A couple of weeks ago I listened to the audiobooks of both Dracula and Frankenstein. Now I read these many years ago and really enjoyed both of them. In fact, I remember at one point during the middle of Dracula, hoping it would never end, that was how much I was invested in the story. But I have to say, listening to both of these was nowhere near the same experience as tasting the words on the page.

Perhaps it was because I knew the stories, perhaps I’m older and have read many other novels since, or perhaps it was because I couldn’t shake the word epistolary from my mind.

So why not infect the internet with my thoughts on this storytelling technique? Well, OK then.

I’m sure you know what this is; a story told through letters, articles, reports, etc. It’s a great way to show characters’ innermost thoughts, what they’re willing to share with others, and how one-sided they can see things. It is certainly a different way of telling a tale.

But if the style is so interesting and offers this doorway into the souls of characters, why aren’t there more of them? I could only think of a handful, and a quick Google search did present me with more, but still not really that many in the great literary multiverse out there.

Epistolary stories differ from conventional first-person narratives, I think, because the character speaking (well, writing) is doing so with the intention of someone actually reading their words and knowing their thoughts. Whereas, in the other format, the character is only really explaining things to an unknown audience, as we – the actual audience – don’t really exist in their world. So does this major difference make them divulge more or less information to us?

Hmmmmmm……..

This may be a bold statement, but I don’t find stories written in the form of letters and diary entries to be that realistic. So let me explain. Supposing you had a really weird thing happen to you and you decided to write a letter (well, an email these days) explaining the details. Or maybe your audible telling of said event was transcribed. I am willing to bet that these would not appear as they do in an epistolary novel.

It’s funny how a letter by someone losing their mind would still manage to be punctuated correctly with absolutely no typos, have appropriate speech tags, and produce spoken passages from another person verbatim. There’s no ‘They said something like…’ or ‘He was going on about this thing and put it really eloquently, but he said so much I can only remember the gist of it,’ or ‘She mumbled some of it so I’m not sure what she was getting at.’ And how about sentences and paragraphs crossed out after they’d digressed from the main topic?

Now of course I appreciate these books cannot be like this, because their popularity would be pretty low if there were lots of spelling mistakes and poor grammar, while the author would be branded an idiotic buffoon instead of being recognised for keeping it real. But I reckon these kind of mistakes would make the books so much more believable.

I recently wrote a story in this style, in the form of a lost letter by someone who is losing their mind. And you know what, mine doesn’t follow any of the anti-rules I made up above. Yep, the spelling and punctuation is correct and, at times, may read like it was written for an English exam or something. Although I did later change it slightly, and even put in an email exchange between characters, making it like what an email exchange actually looks like. So yeah, I’m winning that one.

I also had an idea years ago, to write a short story made up entirely of Facebook statuses. It was supposed to be about someone who was murdered and their killer was on their profile, or something. All I can remember is that it didn’t work. Well, not for me anyway. There was no ooommfff that I could convey, and even I was bored reading it.

Which is maybe why I’m being so shitty about these types of stories; because I’m rubbish at writing them. And perhaps there aren’t that many of them around because lots of other authors are rubbish at writing them. It is hard to get invested in a character’s traits and flaws if you’re simply reading a letter written by them. They’re probably not going to divulge anything negative about themselves are they? It’s like a wooden character in a horror movie; if you don’t care about them then you aren’t bothered when they get murdered. Portraying a character that you would care about only using letters, emails, diaries and the like, is really very difficult indeed.

So hats off to those wonderful authors who can weave a tale with this technique; there should be more of you!

Like I mentioned, I haven’t read loads in this style but my favourite has got to be House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski. I bought this expecting it to be either absolutely amazing or pretentious nonsense. Thankfully it is the former.

Carrie by Stephen King is one of the most well known in horror (I think). I liked it, but prefer many of his other works.

The Martian by Andy Weir was not horror, obviously, but I found this one great and I can kind of forgive the formatting and editing because the guy was stuck on Mars, with plenty of spare time to work on his memoir, despite all the other busy stuff he did.

I can’t remember much about them, apart from really enjoying them, but the Adrian Mole Diaries by Sue Townsend were favourites of mine as a kid, though I’m not certain how literary they actually are.

I’m not sure you’d call them epistolary exactly, but many of HP Lovecraft’s stories are written by people on the verge of mental collapse, frantically trying to get their final thoughts on paper before the unknown and unspeakable terrors get their impossible tentacles into them, or something. The descriptions in his stories do seem quite detailed for people losing their minds, but I can’t gripe with him too much; his tales made me want to write, so thanks for that!

Thank you for reading this far, I’m sure there are many more I have yet to indulge in, so let me know which tales of the most excellent epistolary I need to be involving myself with next, or which ones I have simply forgotten about.

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Categories: writing

Tags: carrie, dracula, epistolary, frankenstein, horror, horror author, house of leaves, letters, novels, the martian, writer's blog, writing, writing techniques