I am writing 100 How-To essays. It is a big project. Here is why I am doing it. This is essay 46 of 100.
On May 1, 2014 — which is now fully SIX YEARS PLUS in the past — I promised on my blog that, "One of these days I will write a thing about writing letters.” I wrote this because I had spent the whole day writing letters that day, and I didn’t want to have to blog on top of that, but I had assured my three readers that I would blog every single day back then.
Well, Past Sophie, I’m here to make good on your promise. I still write letters in much the same way, although there are different people I write them to, and my return address has changed.
My love of letters began when I was seven, and I learned that they were A Thing. I started writing letters to my best friend, who lived like four miles away, and whom I saw multiple times per week already. But the thing was, LETTERS WERE BETTER THAN IN PERSON. Even in 1993, I understood that if people weren’t taking full advantage of the US Postal Service every damn day, what were they even doing with their lives?
Seriously, take a moment to think about how purely magical the concept of a letter is. You choose a place to live. That place receives a unique number and a name. (This is called a “street address.”) This number and name nests inside another place that has been given a name (city), inside ANOTHER place that has been given a name (state), inside ANOTHER PLACE that has been given a name (country). And because of all these names, anyone can figure out where you can be found. So wherever someone is, they can gather up stuff around them — words on a page, dirt from the yard, pressed flowers, a feather, a small binder clip or errant staple, a page-a-day calendar page, and on and on — and stick it inside a paper container, and throw a sticker on it that everyone agrees has monetary value, and make all that stuff APPEAR in the PLACE where YOU ARE. And this has been going on for more than 100 years! This blows my mind, and it always has.
When the internet came out, I got my first penpal, whose name was Marisa Golden. That was her actual name, and not a fake one I’m making up as I normally do when I write a thing I plan to publish. This is because I would LOVE IT if Marisa found me and we got back in touch. So if you are Marisa Golden (and maybe your last name is Goden? I don’t 100 percent remember), holla at me! I will still be your thirty-something-year-old penpal. I met Marisa in an internet chat room, where the main rule in 1997 was you didn't give out your home address. But I was reckless and wild and 11 years old, and Marisa lived all the way in Connecticut. We wrote back and forth for several years and never met in real life.
The internet allowed for a lot of the things that letters were good for to happen much more quickly, which has its pluses and minuses. It’s cool when you’re going through a social drama to be able to send 40 or so emails to your friends and crushes without having to incur a great debt in stamps. But I maintain that being able to transfer a tangible friendship bracelet from your hands to someone else’s hands far away is sorcery that can’t be replicated. Imagine if someone made you a friendship bracelet and then it popped out of your computer! THE MAIL IS JUST THAT BUT SLOWER. Everyone’s all bunched up and excited about 3D printing, and yeah, fine — but the mail is 3D printing that has always existed and doesn’t require a giant machine in your home office. All hail, the mail!
I kept writing to people throughout high school (other friends who went to my school, mostly, whom I saw every single day anyway), and then even more in college (when many of my friends suddenly lived far away). College also had the campus mail, which was the number one coolest thing about college. You could send mail of any size to any student on campus (or professor!), and all you had to do was write their name on the thing you wanted to send. No money, no litany of numbers, just your letter / item and a name and that was it. I abused the campus mail, but I wasn’t alone. On my half birthday sophomore year, Colleen sent me a package that contained a real balloon and I absolutely lost my mind over how cool an idea this was, and how did she know it was my half-birthday, and I might have fallen a little in love with her.
After college, I moved to New Orleans and wrote more letters. Once, I saw a YouTube video (long ago taken down, to the misfortune of everyone in the world) of a freshman boy at my former college dancing around the quiet room in the library to an Elvis Costello song. That was cute, and I had a crush on the boy immediately. Then I found out his name and learned he had a website and was an artist. I went to his website and fell in love with him 100 percent before ever meeting him. Since he went to my old college, and I knew how campus mail worked, I knew how to send this stranger a letter. Which I did. And he wrote back, and I wrote back, and on and on, and before you knew it we dated for almost three years and I wrote a book because of him.
I also sent letters to a man with whom I made eye contact at a restaurant in San Francisco who ended up living on a boat. And to a man I tried to go on three dates with, but who was interested in me conceptually without being actually into me at all. And to a man who worked at (or ran?) a puppet theater in Los Angeles and had a British accent. Eventually, the men fall in love with other women and stop writing you back — but their letters, all of which I kept, were great.
Now my penpals are all women I admire but don’t get to spend much (or any) time with. They are some of my best penpals ever, and they are patient when it takes me six months (TO A YEAR, LET’S NOT LIE) to respond to their letters. It is interesting to see how my penpals have reflected my changing desires and interests through time. As a kid, I wanted my friends to like me more. As a young adult, I wanted to date all the men. As an older young adult, I wanted to read about the lives of people I admired. I just realized this right now. It’s blowing my mind.
Before I tell you my advice when it comes to writing letters, I want to make a digital shrine (but this paragraph will have to do) to Jess from New Orleans, who is one of the most genuine and interesting people alive on this earth. Jess has gone through phases (and may still be going through them) where she sent a letter every day. She writes letters on the backs of photographs she’s taken and had developed. She sent me a piece of felt in the mail sans envelope, with my name and address stitched into the back that said, “I’ve gone soft” on it (also in stitching). Her writing is lovely and intricate and fascinating and I read her letters with a kind of hanging-on-wishing-this-could-last-forever feeling that I associate with falling in love, hard, for an intense and short amount of time. Her letters should be in a book, and the book should be a best-seller. She also sends fan letters to famous people. She is the patron saint of the U.S. Mail.
So anyway, what I’m trying to get at (badly) is that I think you, reader, should write more letters. It’s easy and it’s fun and it’s magic, and now that we are in the midst of a global pandemic, you can and should take advantage of the time you might suddenly have to write letters with your hands to people you love, admire, and / or are interested in. As I write this, the US Postal Service is in danger of running out of money, and it’s possible that we face a future without this sparkly impossibly cool institution. So buy a bunch of stamps and be a part of making that not happen.
The most important thing to know about writing a letter is that you don’t have to write a long one. Even if you’re RESPONDING to a long letter, feel free to keep it short. Limit yourself to postcards if you’re easily overwhelmed. The act of receiving the letter is enough. When the mail was new-ish, postcards were rampant, and the messages were scant. A postcard was a piece of paper that told a person they were being thought about, and that was enough.
The second thing that I would add is that you should ask the person you are writing a letter to one actually interesting or thought-provoking question. At least one, but no more than six. I also think you should give the person you are writing the letter to one specific and true compliment. It is universally true that people like to read about themselves and to write about themselves.
And finally, put stuff in your letter! By stuff I mean STUFF; like flower seeds, or other people’s photographs, or something you cut out of a magazine. My life is much more interesting because I spend so much time looking for things that I can send in envelopes to people. It gives me a sense of drive and purpose that I enjoy. I have a great collection of these kinds of things, and I love picking them out accordingly for those with whom I correspond.
I like using a typewriter, by the way. It feels good under my fingers. But find your favorite way to write and write that way. A black gel pen is deeply underrated in a world where people are snobby about pens.
One of the most perfect things about a letter is that it is a piece of writing that you are making for only one other person. In general, the world moves towards mass production and away from honest personalization. Faster equals cheaper and cheaper equals profitable and profit equals happiness, is the company line. When we write or draw or make a speech, we want to get paid for it, and that’s fine. But how simple and kind it is to do something for another person just because you love them, or care about them, or want them to know that you see them. This piece of writing will never be seen by anyone else. You can’t come back to it and Copy+Paste it into your memoir. It’s a private artifact that you’ve made for someone else, and no one will pay anyone for it until (if you happen to get famous in your life) after you’re dead. It’s slow and truthful and private, and that is a rare, lovely thing.