Jennifer Ryan asked Jennifer Ryan:

Had you worked with the epistolary form before? How hard was it to make everything you needed to tell your reader fit in this format?

Jennifer Ryan The letter form is one of my favorites, and I’ve used it in short stories and some previous novel ideas. I really enjoy the way the voice exposes the inner feelings and personality of the character, and the way she interacts with the off-stage recipient adds an extra tension—is she being true to herself or is some kind of pretense going on? It leaves some lovely space for an unreliable character to come through—someone who isn’t telling the recipient (or the reader) the truth, and will inevitably be uncovered by the end.
Most of all, I wanted The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir to be a fast-paced read that presented the stories of a selection of people over a short space of time, and the use of letters and journal entries gave me precisely that: the chance to display an inside-out delve into five characters, their dreams, their goals, and their deepest fears.

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