Letters, notes, postcards—what is it about written correspondence that has given life to fictional characters throughout literary history? Join us as we discuss the sub-genre of epistolary fiction, which we covered in the Creatinuum Podcast episode "To the Reader, with Love: The Evolution of Epistolary Fiction."
Simply defined, epistolary fiction is a sub-genre of literature in which the story is told through the use of letters, diary entries, logs, and other forms of written correspondence. You're more likely to have encountered this type of fiction than you think; it is prevalent in such classics as Dracula and Frankenstein (letters exchanged among the different characters), along with more contemporary favorites such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower (the protagonist writing letters to an unnamed receiver—later revealed to be a psychiatric exercise for himself).
For many people, journal writing has proven to be a worthwhile exercise in understanding what they go through and how they process different feelings as they mature or simply go through the motions. Personal diary entries reveal much about how someone thinks and feels, and this applies just as well to fiction, wherein a character tends to bare their deepest thoughts on certain people and events throughout the story, revealing much about their personality without the aid of an omniscient albeit detached narrator.
Letter writing between fictional characters can even extend to more modern methods of correspondence, such as email, as observed in the YA book Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, and voice recordings, as found in Thirteen Reasons Why, another YA work. More often than not, science fiction novels use epistolary storytelling in the form of "logs." For instance, in the underrated sci-fi novel Flowers for Algernon, protagonist Charlie Gordon, who is mentally handicapped, logs the development of his own intelligence after taking part in a scientific experiment that boosts its subjects' mental capacities and abilities. Through Charlie's diary entries or "logs," the reader can observe how his writing style develops from that belonging to a child to that belonging to a highly sophisticated scholar. This is a great example of how epistolary fiction reveals much about a character's development through not only the content of their written correspondence but also how they write such correspondence.
For many writers, epistolary fiction is very challenging to write for several reasons; this entails assuming the voice of one character (perhaps many characters) and all the storytelling limitations (e.g., zero omniscience) that come with it. This is especially difficult when the character is merely an observer of the narrative's events rather than contributing concretely to these events (as in the case in Jane Eyre, for example). Still, a well-executed work of epistolary fiction is definitely worth reading and sets out much in terms of revealing a character as well as their development throughout the story.
Video games, specifically role-playing games like those in the Dragon Age series, lend clever ways to utilize epistolary fiction through codices and discovered letters between non-playable characters (NPCs). This adds a flavorful layer to the overarching narrative—encountering notes and letters that reveal interesting, even exciting dynamics among different characters, even minor ones.
While epistolary fiction has been around for literal centuries, it's still prevalent in literature today and continues to evolve in its various forms, from traditional letter writing to "twitfics" and private messages exchanged online. Internet correspondence differs overall from written correspondence, which encourages the author to explore unique dynamics between their characters in terms of how they speak online compared to how they would sound when they sit down and write letters through pen and paper. Overall, we believe that this highly character-driven sub-genre of fiction is worth exploring for many readers and even worth experimenting with for many writers.
Listen in full to Creatinuum Episode 34: "To the Reader, with Love: The Evolution of Epistolary Fiction", available on Simplecast, Spotify, Apple, and other platforms.
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