A Beginner's Guide To Writing Snail Mail

One of the first satisfying things I did this morning was donating a sealed white envelope into a red mailbox. I hope to receive a response in a week or two. Or three. Does it make a difference? The contrast between my awkward habit of F5-ing the digital mailbox couldn’t be bigger. Neither could the yielded satisfaction from utilising both systems. One is very fast, caters to my impatience and fuels my discontent when finally a new email appears that turns out to be yet another sloppy phishing attempt. The other gives me a perfect excuse to ink a nice pen, take the time to write, add a printed photo perhaps, or another physical trinket, and start the ritual of taking out the bike to sprint to the said mailbox.

And thus here is a beginner’s guide to committing yourself to writing less of the former and more of the latter: hooray for snail mail, booh for electronic junk. If by any chance this text convinced you to start writing and looking for a postage stamp, but you don’t quite know who to address it to, please reach out and we can start a fruitful conversation on paper!

Let’s start with the material needed to start writing a letter: pen and paper. First, get yourself a nice pen. This being Brain Baking, of course I’d recommend a fountain pen, but a good roller ball is as good as any. Write with something that feels comfortable: a letter might feel like an endurance session if it’s been a long time since you’ve held a pen. There are plenty of resources that list great entry pens in case you need to start from scratch: the Pilot Prera/Metropolitan and Lamy Safari are both superb and don’t cost an arm and a leg.

Second, consider which paper to use. If you do decide to write with a fountain pen, remember that cheap printer paper has the tendency to bleed through depending on the ink and the pen nib size. I once got gifted beautiful off-white laid paper for writing letters, but the ribbed texture makes writing with a small nib size difficult. If all this sounds too daunting, get out a sketch book pad, tear out a page and just get writing.

How do you address someone? Should you note the date and the location you write from? (“Dear friend x” might do and yes and yes) Did you know that you can write, draw, sketch whatever you want in a letter since it doesn’t adhere to a rigid structure full of zeros and ones? Did you know you can “attach” anything you want as long as it stays under a gigabyte in size? I love slipping in sealed Magic: the Gathering boosters I have lying around and hearing they pulled a valuable shock land afterwards. I love printing a photo with the Phomemo printer and attaching it with a piece of washi tape. I love using different pens to write different sections. Or whatever. Do whatever you want. Write whatever you want. But write.

And don’t stop there: actually sending the thing is also highly recommended. It’s time to choose a stamp. If it’s designated for someone you really like you could consider paying a little extra to pick a nice theme. In Belgium, at the time of writing, 10 non-prior stamps with a theme cost €16,80—with just the king’s boring head it’s €15,80. You can even create your own stamp! My European stamps are gone so I’ll be ordering these:

Weirdly enough, that’s not more expensive than the pre-made philatelic stamps for EU correspondence: €14,75 for 5 stamps. Yes, that’s still much more expensive than quickly blurting out a few words on a keyboard before pressing the send button. Perhaps that’s also an advantage: it causes you to more deliberately think about what to write. And that’s only from BE to anywhere outside BE within EU, so perhaps only my loss¹.

Don’t forget to switch pens when writing the address as the envelopes I can buy here are not made from very high quality paper.

Once you’re done with that, the real fun can begin: flip the envelope, write your own address (Return To Sender, Address Unknown—shut up, Elvis), and then it’s time for the grand finale: sealing the envelope. Since I wrote about wax seals in 2022, I got another seal: of course the Brain Baking logo. I now own both: the W+K design for sending letters to family as mentioned in that post and the Brain Baking one for my internet friends.

I’ve seen folks complain about delays in mail deliveries if they do use a wax seal, presumably because the letter got stuck in the sorting machine because of the thickness of the seal. As far as I know, that’s just speculation, and I haven’t encountered that problem. At least no more delays than the usual delays. We’re still talking Belgian postage services here; they’ve got to live up to their name. Try to not spill too much wax everywhere, I guess?

Now why would you go through all that trouble of sealing and picking a nice stamp? Because you’re not only doing yourself a favour in doing so, but also the person at the receiving end. And no doubt they are worth it as you decided to take out your pen instead of turning to your computer—or even worse, instant messaging app on your phone—yet again.

In case I still haven’t convinced you, please read Simon Garfield’s book To The Letter that begins like this:

Letters have the power to grant us a larger life. They reveal motivation and deepen understanding. They are evidential. They change lives, and they rewire history. The world once used to run upon their transmission – the lubricant of human interaction and the freefall of ideas, the silent conduit of the worthy and the incidental, the time we were coming for dinner, the account of our marvellous day, the weightiest joys and sorrows of love. It must have seemed impossible that their worth would ever be taken for granted or swept aside. A world without letters would surely be a world without oxygen.

Time for the final act: take out a bike (or polish your walking boots), seek out a mailbox, and donate the envelope, hoping for the best.

Wait. I forgot to tell you something important. Did you already seal yours? No? Good. Because just a touch of modern technology usage won’t hurt here: take a snapshot of your letter—both sides. In a month, when you do receive a reply, you can still refer to whatever it was that you sent. The original one doesn’t usually get sent back like in a digital email conversation. I once received a reply and after three weeks I completely forgot what I wrote. “It was very touching”. Thanks but… what was again?

Happy posting!

braindump   letter writing