Five Things to Remember When Writing Epistolary Fiction
Thinking of writing a story through letters? Here are a few things to keep in mind
“Epistle” is just a post-graduate word for a letter. Thus, epistolary fiction is fiction in the form of letters…or journal entries, articles, message logs, transcripts, blog posts, or any other type of document.
The epistolary form is a very old one — nearly as old as the Western novel itself — but it continues to find purchase today. It’s a popular style with authors who want to lend an air of day-to-day realism to their works, explore unusual perspectives, or focus on characterization over bloated descriptions. It works for both long- and short-form and lends itself to a variety of story types.
However, there are things to consider before diving into epistolary fiction. It is, in many ways, a restrictive form with its own rules that can differ greatly from those in more conventional narratives. I’ve seen many people jump in to an epistolary story without considering these differences, and the results aren’t pretty.
So here are a few things to remember when writing your own epistolary novel, story or poem:
Pick an appropriate story
The good news is that, unlike certain other forms such as serial or audio fiction, most stories can work as epistolary stories, but some are certainly better fits. As an inherently subjective style, the epistolary form tends to favor character-driven narratives and works well with high suspense, multiple POVs, and unreliable narrators. It has a long history in the genres (particularly horror), but can work wonders in realistic stories as well. It’s also very well suited to certain types of author — writers from journalistic, academic, or other technical background may find it very comfortable.
By contrast, the epistolary form is a poor fit for any story that demands a sense of immediacy. While a clever author can certainly work an action scene into an epistolary novel (via a television transcript, for example), a story that relies heavily on action will be a very awkward fit.
Keep it simple until you’re used to it
The epistolary form also lends itself to stories of varying degrees of complexity. While most epistolary fiction features a single document type and a handful of POVs (i.e. a single person’s journal or an exchange of letters between two people), the author can bring in any number of perspectives and document types to add more depth.
Be very cautious about doing this, though, as it can be easy to muddy the narrative if the style is too complex. Think of the epistolary novel as a file folder, with the reader trying to assemble a story from the contents. The more documents the reader has to deal with, the more likely she is to become lost. Always use the minimum number of POVs and document types, especially when you’re first starting out.
Mind the length
An interesting quirk of epistolary stories is that they might not be as long as they appear. Letters can be fairly dense — without dialogue, they tend to have longer paragraphs, meaning they may have more words per page than a convention. On the other hand, documents that are primarily dialogue, such as transcripts or chat logs, are likely to have fewer words than one might anticipate. This can make writing epistolary short fiction difficult, especially when one is writing for a particular market.
Epistolary novels have a similar problem — they are at high risk of coming in short. Many forms of correspondence are far shorter than standard book chapters, so the writer will need more of them. Whereas a typical 80,000 word novel might be expected to contain 20 to 40 chapters, an epistolary novel might need well over a hundred documents to achieve the same length.
Before starting an epistolary novel, it’s wise to make a brief survey of the important documents you’ll include so that you have some idea of how long the final manuscript might be. If you’re afraid that this might detract from a feeling of spontaneity — another trait of the epistolary form — then you can keep this very basic, with only a few critical plot points laid out. A skeleton outline works well for this purpose.
Be realistic
Now we have to take a minute to talk about ellipses. The ellipsis is used to suggest that someone’s speech is trailing off, and is thus very common in dialogue…but not necessarily in epistolary fiction. How often have you seen a person type an ellipsis into a text message? It’s hardly common in real life, but many writers will try to cram their conventional dialogue into an epistolary form, and the results can be jarring.
When writing speech into an epistolary story, always remember the medium of communication you’re using and how people write or speak in that medium. That may mean leaving a few typographical errors in a chat log, using different language in a letter to a person superior to a character than one to a friend, or inserting crosstalk in a transcript. Oh, and while this might seem like a no-brainer, don’t have a character writing in-the-moment exclamations in a journal or blog post — I’ve seen plenty of people put a variant on “Oh my God! He’s in danger, I have to save him!” into diaries and it never fails to make me laugh.
But not so realistic that it gets in the way
As a fiction writer, realism should never be your sole concern. Your goal is to tell an interesting story, and bending the truth a bit is part of that.
It’s no different in epistolary fiction. Yes, be true to the medium, but not so true that the story becomes sluggish or hard to read. Leave a few errors in your text messages, but don’t turn them into unreadable clusters of shorthand. When using a personal letter or postcard, give yourself permission to trim out the banal “Everyone is doing fine” bits — if it’s dull in real life, it doesn’t belong in your narrative.
Finding a balance between realism and readability is perhaps one of the hardest parts of writing epistolary fiction, but it can be overcome. Just read through every document after you’ve written it, then ask yourself two questions: Does this feel real? And: Is it interesting?
