The Art of Writing Letters / Pen Friends

Occasionally I write letters. Occasionally I receive them. Most often, I forget how great it is to write them. I never forget how great it is to receive them. This is one of those tricky things I will likely often write about, because forgetting how cool things are, or remembering them being more difficult than they actually are is one of those huge problems of the modern world. Think about it…

…No, but really, think about it. Because to do that, you need to clear some space. Especially because you are now reading this on the internet. It’s too easy to click away to something else as soon as you are asked to do a little work, or what feels like a little work.

Here’s what I mean:

You come home. You’re listening to your music on your phone. Maybe you unplug. You kick off your shoes and right away, probably without thinking, you turn on the TV or the computer. You want to know what’s going on in the world or you want to play a game or catch up with what friends are saying somewhere or you want to play a music video or carry on building that amazing house in Minecraft. Now a lot of these things are easy. Some of them are cool. Some of them, though, are the kind of things you remember as being cooler and more pleasurable than they actually are. You can sit down at the computer or switch on your iPad upon coming home, for example, and be there for the next few hours reading stuff, watching videos, chatting to friends and playing games, and still feel like you need more, still feel cheated out of your day when it’s time for bed, as if you can’t believe there is not more time in the day to play games and watch videos and chat to friends. It’s all so easy and it passes the time, but it so often delivers little back. Sometimes people remember reading books or writing letters (not e-mails), or sitting down to draw pictures or cartoons, even write stories or practise the guitar or the piano, as being something like work. If you manage to not turn on the computer and click your evening away thirty seconds at a time, and sit down instead to do any of these things, though, then even if you intend to spend only half an hour or so, you often find that you are getting so much back from it, and that your brain warms up much like your muscles do when you play a game of football or volleyball, and you have so much enthusiasm you want to keep going. Those days you go to bed amazed at how you have managed to do so much.

Occasionally, I rearrange things in my room, close down my laptop and put it away so it’s not the first thing I see when I come in, not the first thing I pick up. I have written a little before about having a place that’s suitable for reading or for thinking, a quiet, perhaps uncluttered place free of anything that can be clicked, fiddled with, or provide distractions and interruptions. In my flat, that is a relatively clear desk. You may need to do this before you can write your letter.

I say write, but I fill letters with drawings and scribbles. Can I draw? A little. Not well at all when I am out of practise, but it’s like anything, the more I do it, the better I get. A couple of weeks back when I had my first English lessons of the summer, I told my students that my first drawings would not be so good. My scribbles and drawings were famous with my students years ago when I first began to teach English, and they my adult students love them now. They might be silly, they might be realistic, or they might go badly wrong, but however they come out and however they are intended, they tend to help with remembering words and grammatical rules and they certainly help my students to go back over the old notes they collect from past lessons. In a letter, just the same as in a diary, drawings and doodles are an extra level of expression, helping you to get out what you are thinking about, what you have been doing, what you are looking forward to, and anything else.

With letters, as with life, you put effort in, it tends to come back to you. If you spend a little time doodling and drawing, maybe the person you’re writing to will take as much time in their reply.

“Letters?” You say. “Why would anyone bother to write letters when they can write e-mails and direct messages over the internet, sending photos and links to music and videos and everything else.”

Because it’s more personal, is one answer. Because probably nobody else will read it on its way. Send an e-mail or a message over the internet and chances are it will be scanned for words to build up a profile of what you are interested in so advertisements on your computer will flash up at you talking about the things you enjoy, giving you more and more things to click and waste thirty seconds of your life; chances are one of those people who are trying to suck up and store the communications of everybody in the world will do just that so that the file, instead of being sent directly to the person you are writing to, gets written to hard disks and passed around and copied all over the world, read and scanned by computer after computer. Because you write differently when you write on paper with a pencil or a pen, free of the distractions on-line, is another answer. You won’t know this until you try it. Because opening a letter from somebody is an event, something that never loses its excitement over time. Because your handwriting, and even the colour of the ink as it may change when you take a break and come back to it later, can say something about how you were and what you were doing when you were writing. Because, simply because it is not something you do so often, writing a letter makes you think of your life and how you are and what you have been doing over the last few weeks or months, not that very day, meaning you think about and discuss different things entirely. For all these reasons and many more that you won’t begin to understand until you do it yourself, writing a letter is incomparably better than writing an e-mail.

So, who to write to? Well, some of you will have friends and relatives who live abroad, and some of you might have moved away or might soon be moving away from friends you have made in Prague. If you don’t, well, there are ways to make friends by writing letters. And that is partly what this post is about. I would like, from September, to collect the names and addresses of people who would like to write letters to some of my students, and put these up somewhere in the library. Now, you ought to always be careful about giving your address and personal information out over the internet, so I would suggest that these addresses should be at schools who can deliver the letters to pupils who will then write back. One possibility is that these pen friends may be at schools teachers at our school have gone on to work at. Similarly, I would like my students to tell me if they are interested in having what we call a pen-friend who lives abroad.

Anybody who reads this post and is interested in writing letters themselves (if they are a child, from, let’s say age 9 to 12), or having their pupils write letters, may contact me. Otherwise, I hope to give more details in future posts.