You're about to get this in context, but if you're unaware of what an epistolary novel is, it is a book that is written primarily in the form of letters, journal entries or diary entries.
One of my largest weaknesses when I'm making an attempt at writing that's not poetry is dialogue. I am used to journaling, though, and so the epistolary form is too easy of a bad habit to fall into in lieu of dialogue. For me, it's easier than coming up with believable dialogue and getting stuck in the terrible habit of ", he said's." Ahh, the hilarity of grammar.
Yes, we have no bananas.
An unfortunate result of this is that I will get heavily into the start of a story, come back to it the next day to reread what I've started, and it reads like a children's book with very little dialogue. "Sammy did this, and thought that, and he saw this." It's fine for a short story for the writer to tell you everything, rather than letting the character have his own private thoughts. It's not so fine for a novel. It makes plot development and unexpected twists very hard to write well, and very few novels avoid dialogue entirely.
Some of my books do lend themselves very well to the epistolary form. In two of them, the main character is going on a road trip (although they are ultimately very different stories), and in another, the main character is writing her own book. All of these are almost tailor-made for the epistolary form, when a road journal is such an easy fit. In a sense, I start out by writing a very detailed outline, complete with third-person narration of someone's life and experiences, and then go back in and rewrite everything so that it might actually make a decent novel.
I've never been all that great at creative writing, in truth. Then again, I know a few published authors, and they didn't think they were great at it either. They aren't big names in fiction or anything like that, but they did manage to get published. I may have a shot at it, but that's an entirely different kettle of fish.
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