The Epistolary Novel: 180 Examples

After working with college students for 20 years and more recently in the past few years with clients, I’ve seen, time and again, the resistance to—and more importantly, the fear of—writing.

This fear is often deeply embedded due to past experiences, some of which come from childhood. Sometimes the fear is of not feeling capable of taking on something so seemingly daunting as writing a novel due to the mass of information that needs to be understood, compiled, reconciled, and of course, written.

It recently occurred to me that, maybe, approaching novel writing with an epistolary approach—a story told in letters (and a variety of other mediums)—which can be, in theory, bitten off in smaller pieces.

Of course, we still need to achieve the overarching story arc and character arcs expected in novels, but thinking about writing a novel one letter at a time just might take the pressure off for some.

If this sounds appealing or intriguing to you, take a look at this list of 180 epistolary examples. Maybe check a few of them out, see how they’re done, and start one of your own.

Below the list, you’ll find one of my most recent YouTube videos about the epistolary novel.

(Note: Almost all of the titles listed below link to Amazon.com. This is in no way an endorsement of Amazon, nor is it a suggestion that you buy any of these titles from Amazon. It was simply the most convenient place find the titles and provide a synopsis so you can see which titles interest you. If, like me, you prefer to support local bookstores, you can always find titles that interest you here and buy them elsewhere. Also, this statement is in no way meant to be a critique of people who choose to buy from Amazon. To each, their own.)

  1. Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister by Aphra Behn (1684)
  2. Pamela by Samuel Richardson (1740)
  3. Letters from a Peruvian Woman by Françoise de Graffigny (1747)
  4. Julie or the New Heloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1761)
  5. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett (1771)
  6. Evelina by Frances Burney (1778)
  7. Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1784)
  8. Aline and Valcour by Marquis de Sade (1795)
  9. Hyperion by Friedrich Hölderlin (1797)
  10. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1799)
  11. The Wild Irish Girl by Sydney Owenson (1806)
  12. Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817)
  13. Letters of Two Brides by Honoré de Balzac (1841)
  14. Poor Folk By Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1846)
  15. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë (1848)
  16. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1859)
  17. Lady Susan by Jane Austen (1871)
  18. Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
  19. The American Diary of a Japanese Girl by Yone Noguchi (1901)
  20. The Kempton-Wace Letters by Jack London (1903)
  21. Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster (1912)
  22.  Letters From Skye by Jessica Brockmole
  23. Dear Enemy by Jean Webster (1915)
  24. You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters by Ring Lardner (1916)
  25. Zoo, or Letters Not About Love by Viktor Shklovsky (1923)
  26. Givi Shaduri by Mikheil Javakhishvili (1928)
  27. Farthing Hall by Hugh Walpole and J.B. Priestley (1929)
  28. The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace (1930)
  29. Anne of Windy Poplars by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1936)
  30. Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis (1942)
  31. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
  32. Short stories about the Glass family by J.D. Salinger (1953)
  33. Houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono (1956)
  34. The Key (Kaji) by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (1956)
  35. Kagi by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (1956)
  36. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (1959)
  37. Short stories about the Glass family by J.D. Salinger (1961)
  38. Short stories about the Glass family by J.D. Salinger (1963)
  39. Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman (1964)
  40. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh (1964)
  41. Herzog by Saul Bellow (1964)
  42. Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman (1965)
  43. Silence by Shusaku Endo (1966)
  44. The Feverhead by Wolfgang Bauer (1967)
  45. Ada by Vladimir Nabokov (1969)
  46. 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff (1970)
  47. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous (1971)
  48. Carrie by Stephen King (1974)
  49. Letters of Insurgents by Sophia Nachalo and Yarostan Vocheck, as told by Fredy Perlman
  50. A Woman of Independent Means by Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey (1978)
  51. Letters by John Barth (1979)
  52. Shikasta by Doris Lessing (1979)
  53. So Long a Letter (Une si longue letre) by Mariama Bâ (1981)
  54. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)
  55. Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary (1983)
  56. The Adrian Mole Diaries by Sue Townsend (1985)
  57. Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen by Fay Welden(1985)
  58. The Jolly Postman by Allan Ahlberg and Janet Ahlberg (1986)
  59. Black Box by Amos Oz (1986)
  60. Juletane by Myriam Warner-Vieyra (1987)
  61. Memoirs of an Invisible Man by H.F. Saint (1987)
  62. The Facts by Philip Roth (1988)
  63. Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith (1988)
  64. Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Caroline /Stevermer and Patricia Wrede (1988)
  65. The Trick of It by Michael Frayn (1989)
  66. Absolutely Normal Chaos by Sharon Creech (1990)
  67. So Long a Letter (Une si longue lettre) by Mariama Bâ (1990)
  68. Letters from the Inside by John Marsden (1991)
  69. Possession by A.S. Byatt
  70. Griffin and Sabine by Nick Bantock (1991)
  71. Nothing but the Truth by Avi (1991)
  72. Letters from Rifka by Karen Hesse (1992)
  73. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (1993)
  74. “Manners of Dying” (short story) by Yann Martel (1993)
  75. Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne (1993)
  76. Microserfs by Douglas Coupland (1995)
  77. The Prestige by Christopher Priest (1995)
  78. Two Solitudes (short story) by Carl Steadman (1995)
  79. Zenzele: A Letter for my Daughter by J. Nozipo Maraire (1996)
  80. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (1996)
  81. The Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg (1996)
  82. Going Solo by Hope Keshubi (1997)
  83. Freedom and Necessity by Emma Bull and Steven Brust (1997)
  84. The Fan by Bob Randall (1997)
  85. Jazmin’s Notebook by Nikki Grimes (1998)
  86. Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler (1998)
  87. Last Days of Summer by Steve Kruger (1998)
  88. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson (1999)
  89. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (1999)
  90. Ender’s Shadow Saga by Orson Scott Card (1999)
  91. Inconceivable by Ben Elton (1999)
  92. The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson (1999)
  93. Home Thoughts by Tim Parks (1999)
  94. Feeling Sorry for Cecelia by Jaclyn Moriarty (2000)
  95. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000)
  96. The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot (2000)
  97. e by Matt Beaumont (2000)
  98. The Plant by Stephen King (2000)
  99. Tarzan’s Tonsillitis by Alfredo Bryce Echenique (2001)
  100. Ella Minow Pea by Mark Dunn (2001)
  101. Mr. Mee by Andrew Crumey (2001)
  102. P.S. He’s Mine! By Rosie Rushton and Nina Schindler (2001)
  103. The Boy Next Door (#1) by Meg Cabot (2002)
  104. La silla del águila (The Eagle’s Throne) by Carlos Fuentes (2002)
  105. The Year of Secret Assignments by Jaclyn Moriarty (2003)
  106. We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)
  107. The My Dearest Letters by Rodger Morrison (2003)
  108. The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips (2004)
  109. Love, Rosie by Cecelia Ahern (2004)
  110. TTYL by Lauren Myracle (2004)
  111. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004)
  112. Boy Meets Girl (#2) by Meg Cabot (2004)
  113. Ibid: A Life by Mark Dunn (2004)
  114. Almost Like Being in Love by Steve Kluger (2004)
  115. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004)
  116. The Grand Tour by Carolin Stevermer and Patricia Wrede (2004)
  117. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (2005)
  118. Upstate by Kalisha Buckhanon (2005)
  119. March by Geraldine Brooks (2005)
  120. Every Boy’s Got One (#3) by Meg Cabot (2005)
  121. Bloodline by Kate Cary (2005)
  122. Who Moved My Blackberry? by Lucy Kellaway (2005)
  123. The Book of Renfield by Tim Lucas (2005)
  124. World War Z by Max Brooks (2006)
  125. Where Rainbows End by Cecelia Ahern (2006)
  126. Eleven by David Llewellyn (2006)
  127. The Beatrice Letters by Lemony Snicker (2006)
  128. The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years After by Caroline Stevermer and Patricia Wrede (2006)
  129. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (2007)
  130. Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale (2007)
  131. The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland (2007)
  132. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008)
  133. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (2008)
  134. From A to X: A Story in Letters by John Berger (2008)
  135. Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball (2008)
  136. The Letters by Luanne Rice and Joseph Monger (2008)
  137. Overqualified by Joey Comeau (2009)
  138. Voss by David Ives (2009)
  139. Treehouse: A Found E-mail Love Affair by Joseph Alan Wachs and Jason Alan Franzen (2009)
  140. Richard Yates by Tao Lin (2010)
  141. Life Form by Amélie Nothomb (2010)
  142. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart (2010)
  143. Attachments by Rainbow Rowell (2011)
  144. The Antagonist by Lynn Coady (2011)
  145. Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler (2011)
  146. The Islanders by Christopher Priest (2011)
  147. Frances & Bernard by Carlene Bauer (2012)
  148. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wien (2012)
  149. Aeternum Ray by Tracy R Atkins (2012)
  150. Dear Mr Knightley by Katherine Reay (2013)
  151. Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple (2013)
  152. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (2013)
  153. Permission by SD Chrostowska (2013)
  154. The Closeness That Separates Us by Katie Hall and Bowen Jones (2013)
  155. September Ends by Hunter S Jones (2013)
  156. Texts from Bennet by Mac Lethal (2013)
  157. Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira (2014)
  158. Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero (2014)
  159. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han (2014)
  160. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher (2014)
  161. Texts from Jane Eyre by Mallory Ortberg (2014)
  162. Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar (2014)
  163. The Divorce Papers by Susan Rieger (2014)
  164. Every Blade of Grass by Thomas Wharton (2014)
  165. Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (2015)
  166. The Martian by Andy Weir (2015)
  167. The Devourers by Indra Das (2015)
  168. Dear Mrs. Naidu by Mathangi Subramanian (2015)
  169. Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon (2015)
  170. The Incarnations by Susan Barker (2015)
  171. Bats of the Republic by Zachary Thomas Dodson (2015)
  172. How to Party With an Infant by Kaui Hart Hemmings (2016)
  173. Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Nèuvel (2016)
  174. Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu by Yi Shun Lai (2016)
  175. The Boy is Back (#4) by Meg Cabot (2016)
  176. Dracula vs. Hitler by Patrick Sheane Duncan (2016)
  177. Gemina (Illuninae Files #2) by Arnie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (2016)
  178. The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland (2017)
  179. Obsidio (Illuminae Files, #3) by Arnie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (2018)
  180. This is How You Lose the War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (2019)

If you know of other epistolary novels not mentioned in this list, please leave them in the comments below, and I’ll add them to the list.

Sending you mad writing mojo…

Happy writing!

Johnnie
OOOO

Starting Your Book—Step 1: Planning

Photo by Polina Kovaleva

“Go, sit upon the lofty hill, And turn your eyes around, Where waving woods and waters wild Do hymn an autumn sound. The summer sun is faint on them— The summer flowers depart— Sit still— as all transform’d to stone, Except your musing heart.”

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What are you holding in your musing heart that wants to make its way onto the page? Fall is a great time to refocus and honor our impulse to write—herbal tea, spiced cider, or mulled wine by your side.

And it isn’t too soon to establish a plan so you can finally start that book that’s nestled down inside your heart at the beginning of 2024.

To help, here’s your first step in building a solid foundation for your first draft.

PLANNING

Grab the downloadable, fillable handouts mentioned in this video right here.

Sending you mad writing mojo…

Happy writing!

Prompts in 3s – #57

In working with people over the years, I’ve found that people LOVE prompts.

Prompts are great as a palate cleanser – a break from that big, long project that’s starting to feel like it’s never going to end. Giving your creative mind a shot of something new is a great way to reshuffle the mind and allow flow to happen.

Prompts are also great for those times when you feel your creative well has gone dry – even though this can never happen… you are an endless fount of ideas and creativity.

For ideas about how to approach this prompt, Check out Prompts in 3s video shorts on Youtube!

After you’ve written, please share what you’ve created below or just share how it went.

As always, sending you mad writing mojo…

Happy Writing!

Prompts in 3s #41

In working with people over the years, I’ve found that people LOVE prompts.

Prompts are great as a palate cleanser – a break from that big, long project that’s starting to feel like it’s never going to end. Giving your creative mind a shot of something new is a great way to reshuffle the mind and allow flow to happen.

Prompts are also great for those times when you feel your creative well has gone dry – even though this can never happen… you are an endless fount of ideas and creativity.

Is the swing set a modern one or an older one? Maybe even one thought about from memory? Who lost the backpack and what kind is it? What’s inside it? Who finds it? And who’s having the existential crisis?

After you’ve written, please post your work or just to share how it went.

As always, sending you mad writing mojo… Happy Writing!

Overcoming Writer’s Fear: A Writing Exercise

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

“Writer’s block” is a widely embraced ideology, not just in writing circles, but in time-honored narratives around the writing process. We don’t hear about painter’s block or composer’s block or dancer’s block. While painters, composers, and dancers may, indeed, experience periods of time when the flow of their work is more challenging than usual or when it comes to a halt, writers are the only creative demographic that get a name for this struggle.

Writer’s block, I acknowledge, may be a legitimate experience for some writers (Psychologist Edmund Bergler said it has something to do with blocked emotions, but more about that in a future post). Lately, I’ve been thinking that writer’s fear is a more appropriate word for the thing that stops many writers from writing. Or from writing freely and honestly.

Fear of what they don’t yet know—the subconscious can be a scary place until we make friends with it, and rooting around in one’s own darkness can unveil all kinds of startling discoveries.

Fear of what they already know—we’re indoctrinated at a very young age to fall in line with cultural norms. When we don’t, shame is a significant detractor in being true to ourselves.

Fear of what others will think—our need to be accepted and not abandoned is an inherent human need.

I had a conversation with a group of writers the other day about feeling that tug of holding back when writing, thinking about what other people—family members, in particular—will think.

Not wanting to make waves and jeopardize our connection with our Tribe—our connection with the people who gave us life and/or shaped us: parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—is understandable. Our history can feel like a lifeline, and our culture tells us these blood ties should be maintained at all costs.

But I disagree.

Virginia Woolf wrote about the angel in the house in her paper, “Professions For Women.” According to Woolf, the angel was the voice of society that sits on the shoulder of every female writer with its great white wings and whispers in her ear about what is acceptable and not acceptable for a woman to express on paper. She wrote about killing her angel by clocking it in the head with her ink well.

Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash

One of the first things I do when I work with clients and students is ask them to write a letter to their angel—or angels (some of us have many). The purpose of this letter is to create a story that allows for the killing of the angels so the writer is free to move forward with her writing project, unfettered of the ignorant, uninformed, narcissistic yammerings of the voices inside her head, which usually belong to the writer’s culture and/or family.

I can tell you from experience that doing this exercise will piss you off and getting pissed is essential to not caring, a skill all creative people, and maybe especially writers, must acquire.

“Why get pissed?” you might ask.

Every time someone reacts to your words, every time someone whines or shames or cries or yells at you for what you’ve written or what you’re in the process of writing, it is an attempt to silence you. They may not see it that way, but it is.

And if that doesn’t royally piss you off, it should. It should offend you. It should rile you. It should make you want to come out punching and jabbing, metaphorically, of course. And what better way to punch and jab at the world and its attempts to keep you in its tidy little box—so no one has to feel uncomfortable, so no one has to encounter a truth other than their own—than to use your exquisite voice?

Photo by Lacie Slezak on Unsplash

This isn’t easy, especially when we love the people who react to our work. If a stranger calls me out on my content, I really don’t care. If someone I love calls me out on my content, I still don’t care (which is different from not caring about the person), but there’s the complicated tug of knowing someone I care about isn’t able to take in my work, isn’t able to celebrate the thing that means the most to me. Ultimately, it means that they aren’t able to see me.

It’s a shame, to be sure. But hear me now, dear writer. We are not here to pet the boo boos of others. We are not here to hide ourselves so other people can maintain the comfy little personal world they’ve created for themselves. We are here to utilize the gift we were born with—to use words to make meaning of life, and in doing so, to make the world a little bit better.

A family member once accused me of “making fun” of our family. The piece they referred to was actually doing the opposite—honoring what I come from and realizing that, despite my attempts to “rise up” and out of the blue-collar existence, I had, in that moment, come full circle and found myself square in it: cleaning houses for a living with four college degrees. Oh, the irony.

A friend once wrote to me and said, “I’m worried about you,” when she read a blog post I wrote that discussed the certainty of death. How gauche of me.

And I’ve had family members experience anxiety when they believed my stories hit too close to home, when they believed they recognized themselves or other family members in the writing.

As Ann Lamott once wrote, “If people wanted you to write warmly of them, they should have behaved better.” AMEN.

Part of this problem comes from non-writers not understanding how a writer’s mind works, how the creative process—specific to writing—works. They don’t understand the spark that may, in fact, come from a lived experience can morph into a fictional story about a fictional character who is not the writer or the writer’s child or partner or ex-partner or parent or whomever the hell. They don’t understand that while we may—oftentimes, subconsciously—model characters after real-life people, we’re not writing about the actual people. We’re likely making sense of our lived experience that could, possibly, include someone else’s stupid bullshit behavior.

A friend, also a writer, once told me a story about a writer friend of hers who published her first novel. She was nervous about her mother seeing herself in the shrewish mother in the story. When her mother read the novel, she did see herself… but not in the mother. She saw herself in the kind and loving aunt. So, it seems that people will see themselves in our work the way they see—or what to see—themselves in life. They will feel exposed by our work no matter what we do. Bottom line: We’re all narcissists to some degree. Some people want to put themselves at the center of our world. They can’t imagine this not being so.

Not all resistance is to our writing is about perceived exposure, though. Sometimes, it’s because we’re touting beliefs that run counter to what we were taught. In my mind, this is very simply, a phase of growing up. Of individuating.

When I teach my Writing Through the Body™ workshops and we discuss the traits and expressions of the Root Chakra, we talk about how sometimes the Tribe doesn’t have the capacity to allow the individuals within it to transform into their own unique persona. Sometimes, this requires breaking from the Tribe in some way.

In the workshops, we’re applying these traits and expressions to characters, but they apply to us as well. (In fact, they applied to us first.)

The truth is: people will do what they do, and they’ll think what they think. Our job is to mine the narratives of our lived experience to make meaning of the human condition. Nobody said it would always be pretty. Nobody said it would always be fun. But one guarantee is that when we have the courage to step out of the tiny, suffocating box our culture and our family has constructed for us, when we have the courage to set our bizarre, ghastly, taboo, crazy, kinky, beautiful thoughts free, they have a chance to find connection with other people who have the same bizarre, ghastly, taboo, crazy, kinky, beautiful thoughts, we find our people. Because it’s very possible that the people who brought us up, who shaped our identities are not, in the end, our people.

If you’re faced with the fear of offending family, making someone mad, or hurting someone’s feelings, try this letter writing exercise.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
  • Write a letter (BY HAND) to each voice.
  • Give the voice a name and a shape. (If you can put a live person to the voice, use them, or if, after reading the rest of the exercise below, you aren’t comfortable doing that, make up a name and give it a shape. It can be anything.)
  • Describe to the voice what it says that stops you.
  • Tell the voice how this affects you.
  • Tell the voice what it takes from you.
  • Tell the voice why you won’t allow it to stop you anymore.
  • Tell the voice what you’re going to do to stop it.
  • Write, in great detail, a descriptive passage of you squelching the voice—killing the angel in the house. Be as graphic as you like. No one will see this but you.
  • Finish with an “after you’re gone” passage. What will your writing life look like moving forward?

Give a try and let me know in the comments how much weight you shed. I’m pulling for you, creative soul.

I’m off now to write something that will bring discomfort to someone, somewhere.

As always, sending you mad writing mojo…

Happy writing!

Johnnie

XOXOX