It is Sunday night. The greeting is typed and underneath it is nothing. Nobody got engaged, nobody moved, the week was work and groceries and a load of laundry that never got folded. So you write "we had a nice week, not much to report", and you know as you press send that it was not much of a letter.
Here is the thing worth knowing before you write the next one. The weeks where nothing happened are the good weeks. They are the ones your missionary is actually short of. What they cannot get where they are is not news. It is ordinary life, in detail, from a house they know.
This page is about how to write those letters — what to put in, what to leave out, what to ask so you get a real answer back, and how to do all of it in twenty minutes when you do not think of yourself as a writer. We make a product, and there is one section about it near the bottom that you are welcome to skip. Nothing above it needs us.
Why "we had a nice week" is the letter they remember least
"Nice" is a verdict. It is the conclusion you reached about the week, with the week itself taken out.
A letter made of verdicts can only be read once. There is nothing left in it the second time. A letter made of specifics — the dog got into the trash again, your husband has decided the fence is a personal enemy, the neighbor's son has bought a van — can be read four times, because each detail puts them back in a room.
The test is quick. Could this sentence have been written about any week of any year? If it could, it is a verdict. Go one level down.
- "Work was busy" becomes "I had eleven appointments on Tuesday and ate lunch in the car."
- "The kids are fine" becomes "Your sister has started saying obviously about everything and it is unbearable."
- "The weather turned" becomes "First frost on Thursday. I could see my breath scraping the windshield at half past six."
None of that is news. All of it is a letter.
The ordinary is the point
Your missionary did not leave a set of events. They left a house that keeps running: a smell in the kitchen, a chair that is theirs, an argument about the thermostat that has been going for nine years. Homesickness is not for occasions. It is for texture.
Two things happen when you send the ordinary. They can picture home, which is the actual comfort. And they are reassured that they still belong in it — that the house did not close over the gap they left. A letter with no detail in it can quietly read as a family that has moved on.
So: the dog. The car. What broke, and what it cost to fix. What is growing and what died. Who at church asked after them. What you had for dinner on a Wednesday. The state of their bedroom, honestly. Whether the series you started is any good. The tree they climbed as a child.
Running stories beat one-off facts. If the furnace is playing up, say so in week one and tell them in week three whether the repair man ever showed up. Now they have something to follow, and something to ask about. That is how letters start behaving like a conversation instead of a bulletin.
How to write when you are not a writer
Most of the difficulty is not the writing. It is trying to compose a whole letter, from cold, on a Sunday night, about a week you have already half forgotten.
Fix the input and the writing gets easy.
Keep a running note through the week. The notes app on your phone, or a scrap of paper by the kettle. Two or three lines a day, no sentences required. Missed the garbage truck again. Dad's fence saga, day four. Sister Palmer asked after them at church. On Sunday you are not composing, you are copying out.
Write the way you talk. Read a line back to yourself. If you would not say it out loud across a table, cut it. Letters that try to sound like Letters go stiff, and stiff is the thing that is hard to read twice.
Do not tidy it. Typos are fine. A sentence that starts somewhere and ends somewhere else is fine. Nobody is marking it.
Half a page is a letter. Nothing here is improved by length. Four good specifics is a good letter.
When you truly have nothing, describe one thing. Pick a room and write it down: what is on the counter, what is stuck to the fridge, what the light is doing at four o'clock. Or take their last letter and answer it line by line — respond to what they told you, by name, in order. That is often the best letter you will send all year, and it needed no ideas at all.
Questions that get real answers back
"How was your week?" gets "good". "Is everything okay?" gets "yes". Wide questions get short answers, especially from someone writing against the clock on preparation day.
A question earns a real answer when it is narrow, concrete, and answerable in a sentence or two. Instead of "how is the work going", try:
- What does the walk to your apartment look like?
- What is your companion better at than you?
- What do you eat on an ordinary Tuesday, and what does it cost?
- What is the loudest thing you hear at night?
- What is on the walls where you live?
- What made you laugh this week?
- What is something everyone there knows that nobody here knows?
- Who did you meet this week that you are still thinking about?
Two rules about asking. Ask one or two, not twelve — a wall of questions gets a letter that answers none of them. And ask follow-ups by name. Keep a running list of the people they mention: companions, members, the family they are teaching, the man at the shop. Asking "did Brother Osei come to church?" tells them you were paying attention, which is a different message from the question itself.
One to handle carefully: "are you okay?" Asked every week, it is nearly impossible to answer honestly in the time they have, and it turns a letter into a report on their state of mind. Ask about their life instead. Their state of mind arrives on its own.
What not to send
News they cannot act on, delivered in fragments. A grandmother's scan results dropped into the middle of paragraph four, with nothing after it, will sit with them for a week. The answer is not to hide things from them. It is to send them properly: the whole thing at once, where it stands now, who is handling it, and when you will tell them more. If there is something they can do — write to someone, ask about it on the next call — say so. Worry with an action attached is bearable. Worry with no action and no ending is not.
Arguments they cannot mediate. Do not brief them on a family row, and do not ask them to take a side. They are a long way away with no way to fix it and no way to leave the conversation.
Guilt, weekly. "We miss you" is love. "We miss you so much I cannot cope" every single week becomes a weight carried on top of the work. Say it once, properly, then go back to the dog and the fence.
Money trouble they cannot fix. If they genuinely need to know, tell them. If they would only worry, leave it out.
Tests dressed up as questions. "Are you still reading every day?" is not a question, and they can hear that it is not.
Other people's missions. They do not need a scoreboard from the elder down the road.
One thing to send more of: photographs. Ordinary ones, badly composed. The kitchen. The dog on the sofa. The street in the rain.
The practical bit: one address, every week
Two small decisions make years of this easier.
Give the family one shared address. Make a free email account that exists only for this — the family surname and the word mission is enough, whatever is still available. Everyone writing to your missionary adds it as a CC or a BCC, and your missionary adds it to the weekly letter home. Now both sides of the correspondence land in one place, in date order, instead of scattered across your inbox, your husband's work account, and a grandmother's account that nobody can get into.
One person creates that account and keeps the password. Nobody else needs it. Do not share a password or a verification code with anyone — not with family, not with any service, not with us. Everyone else simply puts the address on the letter they were already writing.
If you want your own inbox to copy letters across automatically, set that up on your own account: the gear icon in Gmail, then See all settings, then Forwarding and POP/IMAP, then Add a forwarding address. Google sends a confirmation request to the destination address, and whoever holds that account confirms it from inside their own inbox. Nobody needs to read a code out to anyone else.
Write weekly, not monthly. A long letter once a month feels more generous and works less well. In most missions email time is a set window on preparation day. The day and the length of it differ from mission to mission, but the shape holds: a letter that arrives after that window has closed usually waits until the next one. Little and often means something is nearly always sitting there for them.
It is also easier on you. A weekly letter is four specifics you already jotted down. A monthly letter is a monument, and monuments get postponed.
If several people write, spread them across the week rather than everyone piling in on a Saturday night. A grandmother on Tuesday, an aunt on Thursday. The same total effort, and more waiting for them.
One thing we make
This is the part you can skip.
Missionary Legacy archives a mission while it is happening — the letters, the family calls, the chats and the photos — and prints it as a hardbound book with codes on the page that play your missionary's own voice.
The part relevant to this page is the second direction. An archive mints a private address for the letters your missionary writes home, and another for the letters going the other way. Write to that second address and the letter is passed on to your missionary at the personal email address on their profile, and kept in the archive as the other side of the correspondence. Write to it instead of emailing them directly rather than as well, or the letter arrives with them twice. Each family member can have their own write-in address, so a letter from a grandmother is filed as hers even when she writes from an account nobody has on record. Letters from home stay out of the biography itself — the book is meant to be their words — and print in a Letters from Home appendix at the end: all of them, or excerpts, or a condensed digest, or none, whichever you choose.
An archive is $49 once, then $19 a month for Standard or $24 a month for Premium. The only difference between those two tiers is that on Premium our recorder joins your weekly family call by itself and videos are archived alongside the photographs. Every letter, every chat and every page of the book is identical on both. The printed book is priced separately and cannot be ordered yet; printing opens at launch. The figures are on the pricing page.
We are an independent company, not affiliated with or endorsed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And none of the advice above needs us. A free email address and a note on your phone does most of this job for nothing.
The checklist
- Start a note on your phone today. Two or three lines a day, all week.
- On Sunday, copy out four specifics. Do not compose, do not tidy.
- Include one thing that broke, one thing someone said, and one thing you ate.
- Ask one or two narrow questions, and name a person they told you about last time.
- Attach an ordinary photograph.
- Leave out anything they cannot act on, mediate or fix.
- Set up one shared family address, held by one person, and put it on every letter.
- Send it weekly, even when the week was nothing. Especially then.
If you only do one of these, do the first. The blank page on Sunday night is not a failure of imagination. It is a week you did not write down.