This week we discussed and wrote epistolary fiction, which is a kind of fiction told only through documents. Traditionally, this meant the story would be written as a series of letter written by one or more people, but today epistolary fiction can be journals, newspaper clippings, police reports, emails, texts, or anything else you can think of.

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Some famous epistolary novels are Dracula by Bram Stoker, Carrie by Steven King, The Perks of Being a WallFlower by Stephen Chbosky, Word War Z by Max Brooks, and The Color Purple by Alice Walker.

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Some things to think about when you are writing epistolary fiction are:

•How many characters should you have?

•What kind of writing do you want to do?

• Letters, emails, news stories, etc. A mix of all of these?

• What makes sense for the time period you want to write in?

•Who are your characters and what are their motivations for writing.

•Is your narrator reliable or are they lying in their letters?

•What makes your character’s voice unique?

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Here are some prompts to get you started:

•“He’s just not that into you” or “She’s just not into you” Write about a person who is obsessed with another person but everything they are doing is actually creepy.

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•“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” Use this famous opening line to start your own epistolary story.

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•Write about a person who is arrested for committing a crime, but they can’t remember anything about the night the crime occurred. What is the crime, why can’t they remember and what happens next?

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•Writing prompt “Don’t trust him” ~ “funny, that’s exactly what he said about you”

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•Feel free to use these or any of your own!