My weekly schedule has recently shifted around a bit, and it actually makes posting the Thursday blog a bit easier, as I now spend my Thursday mornings in a lovely coffee shop with a riverside view. It’s good writing inspiration: both a change of venue in general, as well as being in a public space. The idea that people are watching me helps keep me on task. Is that strange?<\/p>\n
I had been thinking of late about the Epistolary Novel, and it’s place in modern fiction, especially in terms of genre fiction. It’s a form I’ve always been intrigued by, because of what it allows the writer to do: establish multiple, concrete points of view, in a format that allows the characters to spell out events exactly how they felt about them. It lets the writer establish a concrete timeline of not only when events occur, but when characters get a chance to reflect upon them. The writings are, specifically, those reflections. And since events are shown deeply in character point-of-views, the story is presented in facets. It’s up to the reader to figure out that greater whole from the facets.<\/p>\n
Now, some might say that “letter writing” is a lost art, and thus you don’t see the Epistolary Novel in the modern age. But I would argue that between email. blog posts, Facebook updates and our other forms of modern communication, the opportunity for crafting a modern Epistolary is ripe. (Hell, the Community episode “Blankets and Pillows” did a great job, while satirizing the Ken Burns Civil War documentary, of showing just that.)<\/p>\n
Many years ago, in the wild west days of the Internet, I had the idea of doing an “Electronic Epistolary”– essentially a story-via-website, where the reader could choose their own path on how to read something: journal entries by character, chronologically, or in whatever manner suited them. However, at the time, I was not a writer of discipline, and it never came together. I currently have some ideas for restarting that, at least as a worldbuilding exercise.<\/p>\n
All of this made me think of how important of written correspondence, even in email form, is for the modern writer. We tend to be a solitary lot, but at the same time, we need that stimulation of dialogue with each other. Heck, check out this letter<\/a> that Robert Heinlein wrote to Theodore Sturgeon when he needed help brainstorming a story. And I know from personal experience that my long-standing email correspondence with my old friend Daniel Fawcett<\/a> has been vital to my writing.<\/p>\n