Being a collector of postcards and discovering a cache of old ones while cleaning out my grandparents’ house sent me straight back to my undergraduate days and it seemed too good not to share.
Weekly Creative Prompt
Creating with Brevity: Postcards as Inspiration for Writing and Art
“Even a single line on a postcard can hold a whole life.”
— Anonymous
In Dr. Richard Koch’s (Captain to us who have known him a long time) intro to creative writing class at Adrian College we did a postcard exercise that I still think about. One assignment asked us to write something that fit naturally on the back of a postcard. The constraint was the whole point: not a story preamble, not an opening chapter, but a complete thing, small enough to mail.
The other exercise involved a box of vintage postcards that the class had assembled. I believe one of mine came from a friend who lived in my dorm—the Other Nicole, we called each other, two Nicole Leighs sharing a dorm floor—who had a collection of those retro pinup-style cards, women with elaborate hairstyles doing ordinary things in rather unordinary ways. I wrote a poem about the woman in the image, a farmgirl discovering herself at eighteen, and somehow landed on something Captain hadn’t seen coming: a coming-of-age piece I titled “Growing Up on a Farm in the 1920s.” He was surprised. So, honestly, was I.
I still remember lines from what my classmates made that day: “I am camera.” “You have one eye. That means I love you.” Constrained to the size of a postcard, people got strange and precise in the best possible way.
That’s the invitation this week.
Find a postcard. It doesn’t have to be exotic—a rack at a gas station, a tourist shop, an antique store’s bin of fifty-cent cards, or the reminder your dentist sent about your upcoming cleaning. Digital archives work too: the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian, and countless museum collections have digitized thousands of vintage cards and made them freely browsable. Search “vintage postcard archive” and fall down whatever rabbit hole opens.
Then create from it.
A Way In
Postcards actually present many different approaches and ways to dive in. Here are a few to prompt you if you’re too intimidated by such an open challenge.
The Image
Let the scene on the front be your spark. Inhabit the place or the moment. Write into what’s just outside the frame, or what happened ten minutes before the photograph was taken. Who stood here, and why does the image feel like it’s holding something back?
The Constraint
Write or make something designed to fit on the back of a blank postcard, approximately 3.5 by 5.5 inches of creative space. A complete poem. A micro-story. A lyric fragment. A tiny comic. The limit is the prompt.
The Found Object
If you have a vintage card with someone else’s handwriting on it, start there. A stranger’s message, a trip you never took, someone else’s joke or longing or abbreviated news from 1953. What world does that handwriting open?
The Personal Relic
Do you have a postcard you kept? One someone sent you, or one you bought and never mailed? What memory does it carry, and what happens when you write toward that memory rather than around it?
The Mundane
The dental reminder. The pet’s annual exam notice. The oil change coupon shaped like a postcard. There is something quietly absurd and strangely poignant about the form being used to say something completely ordinary. What lives in that gap between the postcard’s romantic associations and its utilitarian reality?
Visual Artists and Collage Makers
Extend the image. Let the scene on the front bleed into something larger, stranger, or more personal. Create the front of an imaginary postcard for a place that doesn’t exist. Respond to someone else’s message in images rather than words.
Craft Tips
The biggest thing to understand about postcards is that they may constrain you in ways, but the constraint is not limitation, it is an invitation to unlock your imagination.
Write toward the limit, not away from it
Resist the urge to draft long and cut down. Instead, start by asking yourself what the single most essential image or moment is, and write toward that from the first line. The strangeness and precision that constraint produces is the point, not a side effect, and you’ll find it faster if you honor the size of the form from the beginning rather than fighting it at the end.
Let the image be a door, not a subject
If you’re working from a postcard’s front image, the least interesting move is to describe what you see. The most interesting move is to use what you see as an entry point into something the image doesn’t show—an emotion it evokes, a memory it unlocks, a world that exists just offscreen. Ask yourself: what does this image know that it isn’t saying? What is the thing this place, this person, this moment is trying not to remember? Start there instead.
The found message is a gift, not a limitation
If your vintage card has writing on it, you have a collaborator across time. You don’t have to respond to the message directly—you can write toward it sideways, find the thing the sender couldn’t quite say, imagine the life that produced those particular words in that particular handwriting on that particular card. What did they leave out? What were they actually saying? The gap between what someone writes on a postcard and what they mean is often where the most honest creative work lives.
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