Write me 250 words about someone. I will write them back properly.

What to send

One person. Your mother, a grandfather, an aunt, a house, a family business, one afternoon you have never been able to forget. Not a summary of their life — that is the hardest thing to write and the least useful thing to send. Something smaller and closer.

Things that work particularly well:

• A room, described. The kitchen, the shop, the front porch, the pew you always sat in.
• One argument, one meal, one journey, one Sunday.
• A thing they always said, and when they said it.
• What their hands looked like, and what those hands did all day.
• The thing nobody in the family can explain.

Do not tidy it. Do not worry about spelling, order, or whether it is any good — that is my end of the arrangement. Fragments and lists are fine. Type or paste them into the form below and send them directly through the website.

What comes back

A finished passage, written by hand, usually four hundred to eight hundred words, shaped from what you sent. Plus a short honest note: what your material could become, roughly how much of it there is, and whether you actually need somebody like me or whether you should simply keep writing yourself. Sometimes the answer is the second one and I will say so.

There is no charge for this and no obligation follows from it. I do it because it is the fastest way for both of us to find out whether there is a book in your family, and because reading a short 250-word sample about a real person tells me more than any consultation call ever has.

The fine print, which is short

What you send stays yours. I do not publish it, quote it, show it or use it as an example without your written permission, and the default answer is no. The returned passage is yours too — use it, print it, put it in a card, do nothing with it.