Epistolary novel

In practice

An epistolary novel tells its story through documents written by the characters: letters, diary entries, emails, text messages, reports or newspaper clippings. There is no narrator standing outside the action. The reader pieces the story together from what the characters chose to write down, and from what they left out.

The form gives a writer intimacy and suspense at once. A letter is written in the heat of the moment, before the writer knows how things will end, so the reader lives through events at the same pace. And because each document has one author, the reader can see the gap between how a character sees things and what is really happening.

Screenwriters meet the form when they adapt an epistolary book or borrow its devices. Letters read in voice-over, a diary that frames a film, a story told entirely on a laptop screen: all of these carry the same idea onto the screen. The challenge is to keep the camera watching action, not paper.

A letter that moves the story in a screenplay

The letter does the narration, but the scene belongs to Ruth. Daniel's voice tells us what he believes; the signed bill of sale shows us what has already happened, and her choice at the end turns his words into action. This is the epistolary trick on screen: the document creates a gap between the writer's knowledge and the reader's, and the drama lives in that gap.

What an epistolary novel is

An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents, most often letters. The word epistolary comes from the Latin epistola, a letter, the same root as epistle. The term now covers any novel told through the characters' own records, including diaries, logs, emails, transcripts and social media posts.

Critics sometimes sort epistolary novels by how many writers they have. A monophonic novel gives the letters or diary of a single character, as The Sorrows of Young Werther does; a dialogic one exchanges letters between two; a polyphonic one gathers documents from three or more, as Dracula does. The more writers there are, the more viewpoints the reader has to weigh against each other.

The form flourished in eighteenth-century Europe, when letter writing was a daily habit and the novel was a new genre. Readers found it thrilling to feel they were reading private correspondence. The form grew less common in the nineteenth century, but it never disappeared, and email and texting have given it new life.

Epistolary novel examples

Samuel Richardson's Pamela, published in 1740, is told through the letters of a young servant resisting her employer, and his Clarissa follows in 1748. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, from 1774, consists of Werther's letters to a friend. Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, from 1782, uses the letters of two schemers who lie in almost every one.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein opens and closes with an explorer's letters to his sister, which frame Victor Frankenstein's story. Bram Stoker's Dracula is assembled from diaries, letters, telegrams, a ship's log and newspaper clippings, so the reader knows more than any single character. Alice Walker's The Color Purple tells Celie's story through her letters to God and to her sister.

Modern examples include Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon, told in progress reports; Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, told in letters to an unnamed friend; Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary; and Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, built from emails, memos and documents. The Martian by Andy Weir is told mostly through log entries.

Why writers choose the epistolary form

Letters and diaries give the reader direct access to a character's private voice. The writer can show how a character talks when nobody else is listening, and how differently they write to different people. In Les Liaisons dangereuses, the same event reads one way in a letter to a victim and another way in a letter to an accomplice.

The form also builds suspense naturally. A character writing at night does not know what tomorrow brings, so the reader cannot skip ahead to a narrator's calm summary. Dracula uses this to great effect: Jonathan Harker's journal records strange details at Castle Dracula that he cannot yet understand, while the reader starts to suspect the truth.

Every document is written by someone with reasons, which makes the epistolary novel a natural home for unreliable narrators. Characters lie, leave things out and misread each other's letters. The reader becomes a detective, comparing accounts. The cost is that big events often happen offstage and are reported after the fact, which can drain their immediacy if the writer is not careful.

Epistolary stories on screen

Film cannot show a page of a letter for long, so screen adaptations translate the documents into sound and image. The most common tool is voice-over: the writer's voice reads the letter while the camera shows something else, often the reader's reaction or an action that contradicts the words. The Color Purple and Dangerous Liaisons both use letters this way.

Some films are epistolary in their structure. 84 Charing Cross Road, adapted from Helene Hanff's book of letters, follows a twenty-year correspondence between a New York writer and a London bookseller who never meet. The Shop Around the Corner and its remake You've Got Mail build romances around letters and emails between people who do not know each other.

Found-footage films such as The Blair Witch Project are a cinematic cousin of the form, since the story is assembled from the characters' own recordings. Screen-life films go further: Searching tells its whole story on a father's computer screen, through video calls, messages and searches. These are the twenty-first century's version of a novel in letters.

How to write an epistolary story

Decide who writes the documents and why. Every letter needs a sender, a reader and a reason to exist. If a character records an event in detail, the story should explain why they would bother: a diary kept for a therapist, a report demanded by an employer, letters to someone far away. A document with no reason behind it feels like a narrator in disguise.

Give each writer a distinct voice. Readers tell characters apart by how they write, so vary the vocabulary, length, spelling and mood. A teenager's texts and a lawyer's emails should look different on the page. Let the format carry information too: the time stamp on a message sent at 3 a.m. tells the reader something before a single word does.

In a screenplay, keep letters short and let the scene play against them. Show the reader of the letter doing something, and let the words and the action pull in different directions. Use V.O. for the writer's voice and an INSERT when the audience must read the page itself. If the letters start to explain the plot, cut them back and dramatize the events instead.