Clare Holman-Hobbs's Blog (6)

Dear John,

How do you cope with wanting to be everything? 

I know that is a bit of a strange questions but there is a very long list of things in my life that I want to do or be. I want to be a writer, first and foremost. Sometimes the dream feels so unreachable that I begin to worry that I might not find my purpose in life, after all, isn’t that what we’re all looking for?

I want to be a Broadway and West End star. I want to sing and dance and choreograph my own moves.…

Dear John,

I have lost many loved ones in my life time. It’s shocking because I’m only 21. In those 21 short years, I have lost my grandparents, my aunt and my father.

In a months time, it will be the anniversary of my father’s death. How does one prepare for such a time? I do every year, of course, but it gets no easier. The devastation that a death leaves cannot be rebuilt again. 

I’m sure in your lifetime you have lost many loved ones too. How many? Is that how we…

Dear John,

I want to tell you about the first time I ever picked up one of your books. 

The first one I ever read was Looking For Alaska. I had never read your books before and hadn’t even heard of you. I was travelling around Europe and stepped into a British bookshop in Budapest called Treehugger Dan’s. I picked your book up from one of the shelves and bought it for a couple of euros. 

I read it within a day or two. It was in those moments that I was cemented in my…

Dear John,

Today my letter to you is more of a technical question than anything. I don’t really have anything to describe to you, no feelings of inadequacy or expectations. I’m almost twenty one and don’t really understand some grammatical construction. I know that it is slight laziness on…

Dear John,

This letter to you links in with my previous one about word count. I have a better constructed question for you now. 

Why should I be made to feel like anything less than a novel isn’t worthy? 

Does that make sense? I also sometimes have trouble saying what I mean.

I’ve written a few poems and I liked how they turned out. But I don’t feel like they’re really worthy. Yes I wrote them and the content is about something that matters to me. But they didn’t…

Dear John,

Have you ever written any poetry? I didn’t really, certainly not until I started my Creative Writing course last September. It seems there are many people who are afraid of poetry. There comes this stigma that poetry is boring, or difficult to understand. People would much rather read a chapter of a book before bed rather than a poem.

Why is this? Do poems not touch people as deeply? Do they not raise such poignant issues? They do of course. A poem is a condensed…