How to Send a Postcard Somebody Keeps

The postcard is underrated. It costs less than a coffee, takes four minutes, needs no envelope, and arrives as a small piece of somewhere else. It is also the perfect first physical exchange with a pen pal: low commitment, no address anxiety on either side if you use a PO box, and genuinely delightful to receive.

But most postcards are wasted, because most people write the same four sentences.

The four sentences to avoid

Hello from Lisbon! The weather is lovely and the food is amazing. Having a great time. Wish you were here!

This is not a message. It is a form with the blanks filled in, and the recipient can tell.

The problem is that it describes a category of experience — nice weather, good food, enjoying myself — rather than anything that happened. Nothing in it could only have been written by you, on that day, in that place.

What to write instead

You have about a hundred words. Spend them on one thing.

Pick a single specific moment from the day and describe it properly. Not the holiday — a moment in it.

There is a man on the corner below our window who has been arguing with a parking machine for eleven minutes. A small crowd has formed. Two people are now advising him. The machine is winning and I think everyone respects it.

That is a postcard someone keeps. It cost the same as the other one.

Other things that fill a hundred words well:

A number. What something costs, how many stairs, what time the sun came up, how long the queue was.
A smell or a sound. These travel further in writing than sights do, and the picture on the front has the sights covered.
One overheard sentence, reported exactly.
A small failure. The wrong train, the dish you ordered by accident, the word you mispronounced and what it turned out to mean.
A direct question, so they have something to reply to.

The picture matters, but not the way you think

The obvious cathedral is fine. But the postcards people pin up are usually the odd ones: the aggressively brown 1970s hotel card, the local museum's terrible reproduction, the free advertising card from a bar, the one with an animal on it for no reason.

Look for cards in places that are not souvenir shops — museums, small bookshops, tourist offices, the racks in cafés. And if you find a genuinely awful one, buy it. Awful postcards are treasured.

You can also make one. Any stiff card of roughly the right size can be posted in most countries: a cut-up cereal box, a photograph, a drawing. Rules on maximum size and minimum card weight vary, so ask at the counter, but the answer is usually yes and the result is far better than anything on the rack.

The practical bits

Write the address first, before you write the message. Everyone who has ever written a beautiful postcard and then run out of room for the address has learned this the hard way.
Postcard rate is often cheaper than letter rate, but not everywhere, and not if you make the card bigger or thicker than standard. Ask.
Ink smudges. Postcards travel unprotected through machinery and rain. A ballpoint or a waterproof pen survives; a fountain pen with wet ink may not — beautiful for the first hour, illegible on arrival.
Do not put anything loose inside anything. A postcard has no inside.
Leave the stamp room. Top right, and check where the address block belongs in the destination country.
Expect it to be read. A postcard is an open message passing through many hands. Do not put anything on one you would not want a stranger to see — and, on the other side, this openness is part of the charm.

Postcards as a pen pal practice

A few things members do that are worth stealing.

The "one card a month" habit. A single card, sent to one pen pal, on the first Saturday of the month. It is small enough that it never becomes a burden and regular enough that it becomes a real thread.

The reciprocal city swap. Each of you sends a card of your own ordinary town rather than anywhere you are visiting — the bus station, the shopping street, the local view nobody photographs. These are far more interesting than tourist cards, and much harder to get, which is the point.

The "postcard from a bad day" tradition. One member describes an exchange where they send each other cards only when something has gone wrong, described in as flat and factual a tone as possible. Reportedly the funniest correspondence either of them has.

Postcards while a letter is being written. A card sent mid-gap — "still owe you a proper letter, but the cat has learned to open the fridge" — keeps a slow correspondence warm.

Starting without an address

If you are not ready to swap addresses — and there is no rush; see our Safety Centre — the postcard board on this site does the digital version: a picture and a short message, publicly, to whoever is looking. It works surprisingly well as a first contact, because a hundred words is much less intimidating than a first letter and the constraint makes people funnier.

Then, if the correspondence goes somewhere, the physical card comes later. In our experience the first real one to arrive in the post is remembered for years — which for the price of a stamp is quite a good return.

Send one →