Welcome to Third Room Letters

Hello Writers and the Writing-Curious, 

I’ve been thinking of you. What are you reading lately? Have you been writing? Journaling about your thoughts? Publishing blog posts as you’d hoped? 

Or do you, like me, sometimes struggle to get started because by default you question whether you should write at all? Or maybe you’ve been writing a lot, and your readers expect a GREAT DEAL from whatever you write, so you find yourself equally stalled at the starting line? 

As people with the urge to write, we all have days when we sit down and nothing comes. When we feel so alone with our words that we wonder why it’s worth doing at all.

This post is for those days. This series is for those days. This community is for those days.

A New Way of Writing with Strangers 

Welcome to Third Room Letters, an idea and an ideal: Everyone drawn to writing should be able to get inspired, practice, and find community in a kind, low-stakes way.

Whether you’re a curious beginner, a lifelong journaler, a prolific but closeted writer or already published and facing the pressure of starting the next project, we all need inspiration and contact with other caring humans doing the same thing. We all need people who remind us that our voices, our words, our stories—our efforts to show up and write—matter.

Writing has Always Happened in Community

That old idea passed on to us that writing happens alone—that image of a tortured, lonely artist creating their masterpiece while locked away in a studio—doesn’t tell the full story. The truth is quite different.

Accomplished writers have always practiced and found their voice in conversation with others. They’ve always found ways to get feedback on early work from trusted peers. Even the grand old masters of English literature. For instance, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis read their works in progress aloud regularly in a gathering they called The Inklings. Excerpts of both The Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia were read aloud in C.S. Lewis’ rooms at Magdalen College, where The Inklings met.

These old groups took place in person, and weren’t open to everyone who wanted to write. Indeed, C.S. Lewis’ own wife Joy Davidman was an accomplished writer before she met him, but never attended or read her work in The Inklings.

Today, those of us drawn to writing have the Internet and myriad options to find community and learn how to write. Small and large writing schools. MFA programs. Online and in-person classes. YouTube videos on craft. Co-writing rooms on Zoom. But despite all this access, it’s surprisingly difficult to learn and genuinely connect with kindred spirits on the writing journey, especially if you don’t live near a city. Classes with feedback are expensive. Finding a place where you can show up and say to a caring reader hey, I wrote this, I thought this, what do you think? can feel as hard as finding a trustworthy car mechanic or plumber. Not many writing spaces have the easy give-and-take that C.S. Lewis and Tolkien had, and while self-publishing is available to anyone, the pressure to perform well often crushes the impulse to write.

A Third Space

As social animals, we humans need places beyond home and work to find connection and meet like-minded people. So-called “third places” like cafés, gyms and pubs help us create societies that function better, according to sociologists Ray Oldenburg and Karen Christensen. I believe online spaces can provide this, which is also why I’m writing this on Fika, an alternative to Substack which imagines creating a place for reading and writing online, like “a little bar in the middle of the dark forest [of the predatory Internet], where animals [can] come together and share the stories they’ve found in the woods.”

Expanding on the model I’ve developed with the Daily Sprints I’ve run through The Write Salon since 2024, Third Room Letters provides a friendly online space where strangers can find writing inspiration and a generous, encouraging community of people on the same journey. Over and over in my Daily Sprints, I’ve seen how combining writing prompts and positive feedback exchanges conjures trust between strangers writing in different places around the world. With Third Room Letters, I’m excited to give a taste of the experience to more people—especially those curious about writing but intimidated by the idea of signing up for a class, and lifelong writers struggling to stay motivated on their own. 

Here is how Third Room Letters will work:

• Weekly prompts: To inspire your writing, I will send out 4️⃣ prompts per month, with mini lessons and ideas to help you get inspired. Prompts will follow a theme, which changes monthly 🗓 The first theme is “Defaults” and I’ll be sending out a post with prompts this Friday.

• A Taste of Generative Feedback: For those hungry to connect with others on the writing journey, you’ll have the chance to share your work and get positive, encouraging feedback in return. More on this soon, but for now, you can see a little more about it here 📝

• Third Room Letters Writing Exchange: In the future, I’ll be creating an option to participate in small-group writing exchanges along with additional prompts. Stay tuned!  For now, check out my Daily Sprint class at The Write Salon if you’re interested in a more sustained writing practicee where you can connect with a new, global writing community.  

Writing—learning, developing ideas, trying things, failing, trying again—has always happened in community. Let’s reinvent how that community happens online 🗺

Set aside 15 minutes to write this weekend, and watch your inbox for the first Third Room Letters prompt on Friday 📧

I can’t wait to read your stories 💛

Willow aka Daily Fieldnotes

Hello 👋🏻 I’m Willow, and I share my writing here on Fika because I like their vision of building a better place to read, write and connect with real humans online. All photos are my own unless otherwise noted.