The Lost Art of Letter Writing

I’ll admit it – as much as I love email, FaceTime, skype and the like, there is nothing as precious to me as sitting down and writing a letter. As old fashioned as it may be, I have a couple of old friends with whom I only converse by letter – not because there is no other way, but because it has always been that way, and we treasure the now somewhat antiquated method of putting pen to paper. We have been writing letters for twenty years now, and these surrogate mums of mine offer as much wisdom now as they did during my tumultuous university years.

I asked a friend of mine what she thought about letter writing. She said, ‘Stick to tweeting. That way if you’re totally boring people at least it’s over in 140 characters.’ Accurate maybe, but slightly sad. Maybe the problem is that we try to be a little bit interested in a lot of people instead of authentically interested in just a few. There is something special about knowing a friend finds me interesting enough to read my letters and take the time to write back. It adds value to a relationship in a way that a tweet never can.

As an example, I found out the other day that one of my wonderful ‘mums’, who sadly died ten years ago, had kept a letter I’d written to her a very long time ago. Her daughter had found it tucked in the front of a copy of my book (which I had no idea she’d even read), and had forgotten about it until spotting it again recently. I have no idea what it says, but the fact that she kept it gave me a feeling of warmth, that I was remembered even though I’d moved far away.

Val isn’t the only one who kept letters. I have a pile of them in a box in my loft, letters from the past that encouraged me to keep going, congratulated me on successes, and listened via envelope and stamp during my stay in a mental health hospital, when life seemed unbearable and there was nothing to do but write. I learnt to recognise the envelopes – the slanted cursive of Jayne’s multiple page missives, the chunkier envelopes of Anne’s that included funsize sweet bags.

I’m not knocking the new way of doing things. Email is a wonderful thing, and has changed the way we communicate in both business and pleasure – including eliminating the requirement to send hundred page manuscripts on paper with a three inch floppy! Facebook keeps us in contact with people we might otherwise have left behind, and gives us a chance to share our writing with more people than ever before. Twitter bleeps to let me know cricket scores that I’d otherwise have to wait til the highlights to know!

But there is nothing like coming downstairs at the sound of the postbox, finding a familiar looking envelope, and curling up to read a letter with a cup of tea and a Bourbon biscuit.

This post was originally published on the Association of Christian Writers blog, More Than Writers.

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