Here are my suggestions to the USPS for how to become relevant again:

• Double your rate for direct mail. Junk mail is overused and therefore obviously underpriced. Raising rates would decrease the volume of junk mail, meaning lighter delivery vehicles and better profit margins on the same revenue. Plus it would give Americans a bit of relief.
• Simplify your rate schedule. The current schedule is far too fine-grained. For example, make a single rate for all letter-size mail, regardless of weight. If that means a 1oz letter will now cost $0.75 instead of $0.44, do it.
• Make sending a package dead-easy. Offer free package supplies in standard sizes like UPS and FedEx do. Convert all these starbellied drop boxes into something that can handle packages, too.
• FedEx and UPS are already handling companies who need “fast and reliable, but expensive.” Focus on the other end of the market: individuals and small businesses who need “slow, reliable, and cheap.”
• You have one, and only one thing that other companies don’t: letters. The government gave you a monopoly in this. You’ll probably never have any competition. Yet you’ve given up on it. Make letter-writing cool again. Market high-quality envelopes, paper, wax seals, ribbons, ink, and more stamps that actually look cool. Charge what people will pay. Good-looking letters don’t have to be just for weddings. If scrapbooking has become a multibillion-dollar industry, surely there is hope for letter-writing.

(And I told them as much, in response to a four-page survey sent to me by Gallup.)

pic by John Atherton (cc license)

You probably know I like to write. Some have asked why I don’t “write more often” – I guess when I don’t put anything up on my website for awhile, they imagine I’ve given up writing. In truth, I’ve never stopped writing for the past ten years. I do most of my writing by hand in my own books, or in letters, and when I have time some of it ends up here.

Writing – really writing, the act of writing, not just typing thoughts in a blog’s “new post” field, is a beautiful experience that, for me, preceded this website, overlays and infuses all other forms of expression, and will alone succeed them when they are all gone.

The two extreme ends of the creative process are the most fascinating to me: it begins in the ethereal realm of creativity and inspiration (both of which I firmly believe are essentially spiritual observation, which is a much easier and more fun proposition than having to come up with brilliant things on one’s own) and ends in the tangible, drops of ink and smooth paper. With blogs or any printed medium, somewhere in the middle you have grammar and paragraphs and formatting issues, saving backups and revisions. But with journaling there is no such interposition – not even of conventional grammar or spelling, if you can do without them. Thoughts to paper, and thence to posterity.

In perusing reviews of various sketchbooks and blank journals online, I’ve read a lot about people who are afraid to write in their fancy new journals because their thoughts don’t feel “worthy” of the medium. I have never had that problem, and I’m pretty sure people who do have the wrong idea about what a notebook is for. The whole process starts with having something to write in the first place – something you are compelled to give birth to, to preserve, in at least some kind of rough, unfinished form. Then I think, what kind of book would I want to put this in? (There are many kinds, and it’s marvellous what the right one can do to make the process enjoyable.) So you buy the book and start writing. If you really have nothing to write about but grocery lists, then no notebook is going to inspire you, it will only intimidate you.

Everyone with a desire to create (and a corresponding fondness for the tools of their craft) should read the chapter about the painter in The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. The right notebook, the right pen, the color of ink – these can turn a mundane writing experience into a positively magical one. But to think of them as anything more than mere tools is destructive of creativity.

(This post was originally published on jdueck.net)