On Writing Letters

  As an child/adolescent, I found letter writing difficult.  I started when I was about ten years old, when my family moved and I left my first real best friend behind.  As a ten year-old, they were very typical letters, starting out with "how are you doing? I am doing good" and mentioning one or two events that happened in the past two weeks (or months).  As I got older I began to struggle with writing because my letters seemed so dry and uninteresting.  Nothing ever happened to me that was worth writing about, so the letter would wait for weeks, then months, and by that point I felt I was the worst friend in the world for waiting so long to reply their letter!  Sometimes I would write and apologize for my long silence, but most times it was just easier not to write.  Why would they want to be friends with someone who didn't make time to write them?  Unfortunately, since becoming  full-time college student, I have not kept up my letters with my pen-pals very well.  But in the last few months of high school, I learned that letters are one of the little pleasant things in life that should not be judged on the news that they bring or on how long we take to reply to them.

"Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company."

Lord Byron 

  To write a good and enjoyable letter, we don't have to write about events and we don't have to write about what others are doing, we just have to be sincere and write what's on our heart.  We can go on tangents in letters, letting one thought lead to other thoughts and pretty soon we have a whole page filled.  As an introvert, I have found that I can express myself better on paper than in person, so sometimes I think that the picture of me my correspondents have in their heads isn't the real me because my writing doesn't sound like how I speak.  But, it sounds like how I think.  Sometimes it's hard to express our thoughts on paper because it takes so much longer to write it than to speak it, but by writing them we can work them out and refine them to express what we truly think and believe.

  In this world of instant technology and instant information, we think that correspondence must be instant between people too, but it doesn't!  A letter that was written over a period of days would be more pleasurable for a reader than one that was written five minutes after it was received.  Even after a long period of time, I always like it when I receive letters so I'm sure others feel the same!  Recently I had a pen-pal I had not written for some months, but on an impulse I wrote her a letter and she replied by saying she was glad to hear from me.  That letter, I think, is what really changed the way I looked at writing letters--the length of time in between responses shouldn't end a pen-palship (I don't think that's a word, but it should be).

 “Then letters came in but three times a week: indeed, in some places in Scotland where I have stayed when I was a girl, the post came in but once a month;—but letters were letters then; and we made great prizes of them, and read them and studied them like books. Now the post comes rattling in twice a day, bringing short jerky notes, some without beginning or end, but just a little sharp sentence, which well-bred folks would think too abrupt to be spoken.” 

Elizabeth Gaskell