(I) Love Letters

My handwriting was still illegible in seventh grade…

It mattered slightly more back when I was a teenager, but certainly matters less today. However, that was irrelevant to me. I wanted beautiful, flowy script to pour from my pen! I had some kind of mental block, because my handwriting was just awful no matter how slowly I wrote.

Around this time, my mom bought me a book for cursive writing practice. The single-minded focus of that book forever transformed my ugly letters into the elegant script I’d always wanted.

But this post isn’t about improving one’s handwriting. It’s about the joy of writing by hand and it doesn’t matter if it looks messy. In fact, sometimes messy is even better! Despite what I just said above, I am no handwriting snob. There is no need to write a chocolate chip cookie recipe in beautiful script, it is just so much more fun if it is!

Moreover, writing by hand inspires the momentum to keep writing. I find that when I hand-write a to-do list instead of typing it into my phone, more ideas pop into my head that are unrelated to my daily tasks. It’s as though the tactile sensation of writing anything stimulates the flow of writing itself.

Sometime after college, I found a penpal to practice Japanese with. I was working in a kitchen (the obvious career direction for most debt-ridden graduates at the time), and the highlight of my week was when a letter from Tokyo arrived in the mailbox.

I had a few email penpals at the time too, but it was the physical letters that I absolutely loved to receive. First, when we write a letter by hand, we tend to include more meaningful text since it requires more effort to write it out. Second, the style of handwriting adds a lot of character to the message. Third, the type of paper, envelope, and even stamp adds unique personality. I like emojis, but they don’t hold a candle to a hand-drawn rabbit face or foreign stamps.

If it wasn’t already obvious, I am a hopeless romantic. I love old suitcases, antique furniture, candles, vintage clothes, and finding pressed flowers in an antique book.

Aside from the wistful aesthetic, these things also inspire writing:

• where have these old suitcases traveled?
• what kind of house was that Victorian settee in?
• who wore this wool suit when it was new?
• were the flowers pressed in the front cover of this book meant for a lover?

Old things just seem to be instant writing prompts. There is a feeling attached to them, a history, a story. Sometimes the best way to overcome writer’s block is to go browse your local thrift stores!