Thank you for your email. I am currently out of the office, and will respond on my return. I have been out of the office since the start of this year, attempting to conduct my correspondence offline, and although the attempt has been only partially successful I will continue to be, as far as possible, out of the office.

Of course, when I say I'm out of the office, what I actually mean is that I'm trying to write. At my desk. In my office. I'm as confused as you are about what is work and what isn't work. When is a writer – whose job is to notice, and think, and puzzle over the right words for the right thing – not at work? And all the other stuff that turns that work into work that pays – the invoices, the invitations, the follow-ups, the applications – is that work, or is that the work that stops the writer from getting to the work?

If your email is work-related, please contact my agent or my publisher. If you wish to contact me directly, you could write me a letter. Have you written a letter lately? This might be a good moment to rediscover the pleasures of doing so.

I wrote a lot of letters, years ago. From the age of 15 through to my final year at university, I spent much of my spare time writing – and waiting for replies to – letters. My correspondents were a combination of friends I had made at summer camps and people I'd connected with through fanzines. Some, I will concede, were girls I was trying to impress. One was a penpal in the traditional sense, from Prague, who sent me tapes of underground Czech punk rock in exchange for fey indie mixtapes I'd recorded off the radio. And it was in those letters that I first began to think consciously about how to write; to describe the world around me, to fictionalise and recreate, to play with different voices. The letters were handwritten and illustrated, usually on lined A4 sheets, and were often sent with additional material; tapes, photos, magazine cuttings. These were physical objects, which travelled a physical distance and maintained a physical presence in my life. I have them still, long after many of the friendships they document have faded away.

If your email is urgent then I would ask you to reconsider your definition of urgent.

Letters, even when sent by return of post, always give you time to reconsider. The inbuilt delay of the postal network reintroduces patience to a correspondence. A letter always comes from the past, from elsewhere, rather than from the ever-insistent here and now of the digital. Thinking about writing a letter is different from thinking about writing an email.

If you have emailed repeatedly since I first set up my out of office reply at the start of the year, you may wish to note that I am still out of the office. For a month or so after I first stepped away from my desk, the emails kept coming. I ignored them, with a Bartlebyesque thrill, and eventually they slowed to a trickle. Some people did redirect their messages to my agent or publisher (although many didn't, interestingly), and some people sent me postcards and letters. The letters I've written in reply have been the first for a long time. It's taken a while to get over the hurdle of feeling like finding an envelope and a stamp and a postbox is a hassle; it's really not. Our postal system is still intact (for a while at least). And once that hurdle's crossed, letter-writing can be as quick or as slow as you like. It can also be a very good way of turning a casual acquaintance into a friend; the aura of privacy which a letter carries, the sense that you're not just adding something else to the datastream that could be forwarded or copied at will, encourages a sometimes surprising level of revelation.

By semi-coincidence, this week I've launched a new literary journal, the Letters Page, which invites submissions in the form of hand-written letters, and I've been struck by how many of those submissions have been personal and self-revealing. Even though the writers were knowingly writing for publication (with the possible exception of Magnus Mills, whose handwritten letter explaining at length why he couldn't submit a handwritten letter was so good that we published it anyway), there was clearly something about the form that encouraged openness; not the oversharing of social media, but a more unexpected intimacy. If you're interested, the journal, which I'm editing with the creative-writing students at the University of Nottingham, is published three times a year as a downloadable pdf. Yes. The irony. I know. The first issue, with letters from Colum McCann, Clare Wigfall, Gerard Donovan and others is already out; you can subscribe for free at theletterspage.ac.uk.

Attempting to spend the whole year away from email hasn't been without its difficulties. Reactions have ranged from bemused or indifferent to hostile. One writer asked my agent to tell me that I was "a pain in the ass and a diva and everything else", which is probably fair comment. For a time, I was getting printouts of emails in the post, which was just a way of making life difficult for everyone else; and I've sent enough 500-word text messages to realise that sometimes email is the perfect tool for the job. I've enjoyed rediscovering letter writing, and will continue to work my way through the stamps and envelopes. But I will be using email, sparingly, while continuing to remain mostly out of the office. So that I can get to my desk. So that the work doesn't get in the way of the work.

Your email is important to me, and I will reply in due course. But I would prefer not to. Please consider the environment.

Jon McGregor is out of the office but still occasionally on Twitter @jon_mcgregor.