What Epistolary Writing Taught Me About Storytelling
Recently, I wrote a novelette’s first draft by live streaming writing sprints. Eventually that became Upstream, an epistolary-style exploration story in a low fantasy setting about a young man stepping out on his own, away from his family’s farm in search of gold in a local stream. This field note's blog is about the lessons that I learned about epistolary writing from this experience.
It was inspired by an offhand comment in a random clip I saw from Brandon Sanderson where he mentioned that epistolary stories are like the original found footage type of story. The second I heard that, I knew that I wanted to explore that concept and write using it. That is why almost all of Upstream is told through a found journal.
Ironically, I grew up reading Sanderson’s books, and even the Wheel of Time series he eventually finished. So I think it is funny that it happened to be a clip from him that served as inspiration for the challenge. Also, I had never written in the epistolary style before. Now that I have, I wanted to share some of the things that I learned from it, because now I have a much better understanding of the epistolary style, points of view, and reader inference.
What Is Epistolary Writing?
First things first. What is epistolary writing?
It is a type of writing where the reader gets the story through reading letters that the characters have written. It also includes other kinds of documents like newspapers and the diary or journal entries that I ended up using. A more modern take on it might use emails, blog posts, internet forums, or comments on social media.
Epistolary writing can include these elements as part of the story, it doesn’t have to be told entirely through letters. For example Frankenstein opens with a series of letters before transitioning, while Dracula is told through letters, diaries and journals from multiple characters, even a newspaper clipping.
Both happen to be available for free as part of the Gutenberg project.
What Did I Learn From The Upstream Writing Experience?
What did I learn from this?
You will be forced to trust your readers. The journal entries were written by a single character, that has just a single point of view.
That means that every bit of information that the reader gets is filtered through that character’s thought process. That includes their biases, the things that they don’t want to ‘say outloud’ or commit to writing. Instead of an objective omniscient point of view, everything is filtered by what that character would physically pen (unless they are not actually writing it…).
If you are a writer that might struggle with overexplaining, or really ensuring that the audience gets the exact picture of what you are communicating, epistolary writing will be a challenge. Instead you have to build your story and allow the reader to do the heavy lifting in putting the pieces together.
You will have to examine your writing style entirely, and really dig into why and how a character might communicate something.
Modern day might have a text conversation like this:
That should give you insight into the character’s relationship, current situation, maybe a peek at their possible ages or maturity levels. It probably sounds like younger siblings, or at least still young enough to probably live at home. Then the core of their immediate problem seems to be that they had one job to do, take the chicken out of the freezer, and that didn’t happen. It doesn’t come out and say that dinner plans just got complicated for the night, but most readers can probably infer that.
A newspaper article on the other hand, wouldn’t communicate information in the same way. You are forced to dig into:
What you are trying to tell the reader (dinner plans are ruined)
Who is communicating that to the reader (two siblings)
How would they communicate that in the setting (text)
Mom is BIG MAD! v.s. Younger brother, our mother is extremely angry that she told us to thaw the chicken for dinner and we did not. Now as a result, there is nothing prepared to cook for dinner.
You will have to filter everything communicated through the reliability of the narrator.
In my example, we aren’t informed how the character came to know the mother’s emotional state. Did mom say she was angry they forgot to do what they were asked? We don’t actually know.
Maybe mom is mad. The character just saw her pull into the driveway and had the sudden realization that they had not thawed the chicken and assumed she was going to be angry. That might be true, maybe she will be, but we don’t know. Maybe she got a gift certificate at work for good performance, and they were going out to eat.
Depending on how reliable our narrator is, one of those options could be more likely their actuality than others.
That can happen for a lot of reasons. The narrator could be lying. Maybe they misunderstood something so they think they are communicating accurately when they aren’t. They themselves might not have all of the information yet so they are reaching a conclusion based off of what they do know.
The point is that the narrator's reliability becomes part of the story
Most Importantly, Would I Do It Again?
Yes. I got the opportunity to explore a writing style that has been used in some of the most classic literature in the horror genre. I also discovered the Gutenberg Project and got to see the original text of Frankenstein and Dracula. In the end it produced a novelette for the Retinue's free access library. That means I got more practice in all of the layers of the writing process from drafting, to revising, all the different editing passes and managing feedback from test readers.
As an aside, this experiment had the entire rough draft of Upstream writting through livestreamed writing sprints. By itself that was a unique experience as well. If you want to join a future writing sprint, subscribe to the Retinue of House Walker on YouTube so you do not miss the next livestream adventure.
Want to read more from the Retinue of House Walker? Browse our current stories in the Retinue Library.
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