tjs_whatnot | Fandom Snowflake Challenge Day 10: Let's Talk About Tropes Baby... (Reply)

Day 10

In your own space, share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. Tell us about it, tell us why you love it, give us some examples and recs.

One of my favorite story styles is the epistolary. Which is, quite frankly, unfortunate as I will probably NEVER learn how to spell it correctly.

Using letters, diary entrees, emails and such to tell a story just....guh...gets me. I think maybe it's to do with the confessional of writing, or the mystery of it, our because I'd rather get to know someone in their writing than in person? IDK.

My two favorite epistolary books are Ella Minnow Pea and the Griffin and Sabine books. In Ella Minnow Pea a town loses its mind when their statue paying tribute to the shortest sentence using all 26 letters of the alphabet (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog), starts losing its letters. The town takes it as a sign that those letters are to be banned from being used. The book is told in letters from Ella Minnow Pea (or LMNOP as more and more letters are outlawed) and her out-of-town aunt. The way the book plays with language (and phonics) is really fun, the way it subversively plays with censorship and totalitarian societies, while not necessarily "fun" is also done greatly. I highly recommend.

And the Griffin and Sabine books? Well, it's been a long time since I've read (more like experienced) these books, but if I remember right, they start off as a communication between an artist and an admirer. And what's so great about these--besides all the talk of art, philosophy and spirituality, which for me at that time was like catnip--is that they allow the reader to play voyeur (which, let's be honest, is the real reasons I love epistolary stories so much!) you have to open envelopes, and pull out someone else's letters and read the confessions and devotions and then put them back as if you hadn't even peeked. GUH! I loved them so!

One day I hope to write something just like it.

But, until then, I continue to search out more stories like this. When I first joined fandom and was consuming fanfic at an alarming rate ~~that I miss like whoa~~, I found two stories right away that were just... so...GUH epistolary perfections. Midnight in the Owlery and Another Kind of Fandom Wank. Both Snupin and both PERFECT, for Snape and Lupin are sort of the perfect couple to get to know each other-- the real them-- without knowing who they are talking to, without all their issues getting in the way. These two stories, found so quickly and easily and being so amazing, sort of set me up for disappointment. I mistakenly thought that epistolary stories would just be everywhere. In the last 10 years, I have sadly discovered, this is very much not the case. Unless they're hiding from me.

So, can any of ya help a sistah out? Anyone read any good epistolary fics lately? Anyone written any? GIMME GIMME!!