Scripting an epistolary (an exchange of letters) story

I've written (or mostly written - still revising parts of it) a new story as an experiment. I'm trying my hand at a new to me story form; I'm trying to write an epistolary story, which is either a series of letters or an exchange of letters.

When dealing with the first bit of it, the basic setting, has to explain why letters are being written. I felt I had to:
a) set it in 1995 (before most of the world had email),
b) make it an exchange of email, texts, tweets, facebook updates - all of which seemed too busy to fit in a story,
c) set the letters between a pair of people who love to write letters, or
d) go with the scene that's in practically every modern horror movie to explain why no one is calling the police when the horror starts.

I went with d) and set the story in a small town that was practically off the grid. Only one provider covered it and that provider offered a very bad rate for data. I picked the figure "seventy cents for a half meg" because I'd heard of someone getting hit with that as roaming charge when they vacationed in another country and figured that it was high enough discourage someone from texting, emailing, tweeting, etc. As for computer access, the only one the writer has access to is at work where they frown on personal internet use. Something about the entire only having a "256 meg line for data" - which isn't much when an entire town is using it.
Then I had explain why the town has so little net access, so I included that the county was at the bottom of the list of rural areas to have its net access upgraded because a state senator (who chairs a certain committee) didn't like the county commissar.

But as I'm slowly editing and posting that story in pieces to my blog (because I can't think of anything else to post there) I thought I'd asked to see if anyone can think of something I've missed. Call it option e). Is there another reason to use snail mail in this day and age?


I've also discovered that epistolary stories have an unique challenge. When people write informally they often write like they talk, which is a terrible way to write. I found myself commenting on it in the story having one of the writers write:
-----
First, I'm glad you're okay, but could you do me a favour? Go to the local library, find some books on English, and look up "run on sentences". And while it was a long letter, technically it was printed, not written, because your school didn't focus on teaching you handwriting before giving you a computer to type on.
Dear God, now I'm using run on sentences. Borderline ones at least.
-----


Goodgulf

No, it is too expensive and much too slow! In this day and age emails are way faster and cost nothing. But if you have to communicate with someone without internet access then snail mail is the only way to go. In 95 not everyone had a computer and computers were slow back then and prone to failure anyway. In '95 you have many excuses to use snailmail (even tho email was getting off the ground) but even more so before then!

Could be the writers are worried their emails might be snooped on. This would only work if they had reason to be nervous (but the reasons could be many, from criminality or a nervous attitude to new technology or the state to a son who's been on demos and occupations to a job role which involved access to information valuable enough that another organisation might want to snoop and hope that private email security was less tough than work). Could be one person's computer has been behaving oddly, making him/her suspicious, and the computer person who could check it is on holiday/very busy/not trusted.

My opinion is that you're over-thinking it. You can have "the reason" in your mind, without bothering to explain it in the letters. Why would you have to explain that a story is occurring in, say, 1994 rather than 2013? Of course, you would take care not to put anything in the story that would be anachronistic for a 1994 date. And why do you have to make it clear whether the medium is letters vs email? Unless the medium or the year affects the plot in some other way, including an explanatory section is runs the risk of sounding contrived or superfluous, or leave the reader wondering what's so important about it - other than a justification for the means of telling the story.

Check out the entries from the Letter Challenge. In some cases, the fact that the medium was a letter was important, and then it was clear, and needed no further explanation. In virtually ever other case, I found including an explanation of the need to right an actual letter detracted from the narrative.

I've written just one story (other than for the Challenge) in this fashion, and I think it works well without any explanatory crap. Written almost 15 years ago, I need to explain why cell phones, texts, facebook, twitter, etc weren't available, and there could have been a tech reason, in a small town, why email wasn't. But why bother with it? There were three (pretty obvious) clues that these were letters rather than emails - a) it said so in the title (duh!); b) dates (year omitted) being several days to a week apart; and c) that you only read one side of the correspondence, as if the recipient had kept them all, perhaps to read again years later. In my own mind, the story was set years before, not that it made any real difference for the story line or to the reader.

Just write the damned letters! The reader will figure out whatever needs to be figured out, and what doesn't need to be figured out won't matter.

It could be more than loving to write them. Assuming it is a personal relationship, opposed to a business one, there is nothing like the thrill of receiving an old-fashioned hand-written letter in the mailbox. A letter is meaningful in ways an email can never be, partially because they are so rare nowadays, but it is more than that. Between lovers especially - think of holding in your hand a piece of paper that someone special has held in theirs, seeing their script, possibly smelling their scent, knowing they went to the extra time and trouble. It is a piece of them that you can put under your pillow and save.

Also, when my daughter-in-law was applying for her fiancee visa to move here from China, I was asked to send her a hand-written letter to help establish relationship.

Could be a serious hacking that happened a few years back that emptied peoples bank accounts etc and now the town folk are scared of using it. The Provider is the only one who guarntees safty but charges the most he can get and more. Perhaps the Provider was the hacker to make it so they could charge more...LOL.

Town is located in a place with strange magnetism, which affects computers and only paying high price for service will ensure mail goes through.

The reiligion of the majority discourages use of the WWW as it is deemed to be from the Devil.

Here are my ideas:
1) A man in a hospital, confined to his bed, has a letter delivered to him by the foreign speaking , who cleans the floor, but who cannot explain from whom it is.
2) Sitting on a bench in a park you see a little dog, that brings you a letter, in which you are asked to reply by putting a letter in a hollow tree.
3) A strange letter in a bottle found when fishing.
4) A letter written in code.
5) An anateur receives a message in Morse, and answers rhe sender in the same way, noy knowing, who sent it.

Maybe I am over thinking things - but when I started planning the story I asked myself "Why isn't this being done with email?" and couldn't go on without answering. Sometimes I just need that extra verisimilitude in a story...

And thank you to everyone who made suggestions. I think I'll continue with the "town on the edge of the grid" angle, but a later story might involve exchanging anonymous letters, strange magnetic forces, or even just "sealed with a kiss" (with lipstick traveling so much better on snail mail than email).

Goodgulf

Over-thinking is apparently one of my biggest faults (I am often accused of it by more than one person, so it must be true), and so I tend to dwell on such details. But I find that, when I get those type "why" questions answered in my own mind, it helps the story-writing process whether I actually include the reasoning in the story itself or not. Good luck with your story, and all those future ones. I'll look for the one with the lipstick.

Well, because I'm both lazy and relatively 'low-tech,' this is how I'd handle it--in fact did handle it exactly (using the 1995 date) in my "Letter Challenge" story.

Handwritten letters generally include the date they were written, so the whole explanation for the use of 'snail mail' would be contained right there.

Of course, if the story requires some reference to 21st-century technology, then the earlier setting obviously wouldn't work effectively.

To me, the mid-'90s time period would be the 'Occam's Razor' reasoning for the use of 'snail mail' by the letter-writers in an epistolary account... --C.K.