You may or may not have come across the term epistolary storytelling, but I’d say it’s good odds you’ve encountered it in either your reading or writing. If you’ve ever been through a book or a short story and found letters, emails, text messages or quotes and pages from books that only exist within a fictional setting, you’ve already seen it in action.
The terms applies to fiction that – usually in combination with traditional prose – uses alternative methods to get its plot over that also exist within the fictional world. So an author foreword or afterword isn’t an example of epistolary storytelling, though interesting in their own right. But when a character reads that letter, or you show the email a protagonist is sending to someone else, or you show the text that just arrived on your lead’s phone, all of those are very much relevant examples. And there are many more besides, of course – which we’ll explore in the context of genre fiction today,
