From Pen Pals to Plot Twists: How We Connected Before Social Media

So—does anybody remember pen pals? No? Just me? Well then, buckle up, because I’m about to sound like a fossil digging through the dusty attic of childhood communication.

Back in the day, every kid or teen magazine worth its neon sticker collection had a pen pal section. The premise was simple: you sent in your name, your address, and (brace yourself) a small fee to be paid in stamps. Actual, lick-and-stick, make-your-tongue-feel-like-sandpaper stamps. I know—gasp! The Stone Age.

After a few weeks of waiting (because this was before instant gratification was invented), you’d get an envelope with names and addresses of kids around your age who were looking for friends in far-off towns or even other countries. That’s right—before sliding into DMs was a thing, we were carefully sliding letters into mailboxes.

And oh, those letters. We wrote pages about nothing—our grades (inflated), our lives (glamorized), our friends (fictionalized if necessary). Nobody fact-checked, nobody cared. It was the literary equivalent of telling your parents you definitely practiced piano while you were actually outside perfecting your pogo-stick world record.

Sometimes the friendships lasted for years. Sometimes they ended abruptly, when both pen pals sat there for months thinking, “Is it her turn or mine?” (Spoiler: no one wrote, the friendship died, and somewhere a Lisa from Wisconsin is still wondering why I never replied to her letter about her hamster’s escape attempt.)

But you know what? It was fun. It was harmless. And in its own way, it was magical. You never knew what you’d find in the mailbox. It might be bills. It might be junk. Or—it might be a wobbly handwriting scrawl from halfway around the world that made you laugh, or dream, or at least distract you from homework.

I think that’s why I love writing cozy mysteries now. There’s something about that sense of connection—about sharing stories, about making people laugh, gasp, and sometimes say, “Oh no, she didn’t!”—that takes me right back to pen pal days. Except now, instead of embellishing my grades, I embellish murder plots. Progress!

So if you ever had a pen pal, I salute you. And if you didn’t—well, welcome to my virtual letter to you. No stamps required.