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Fictitious letters


Kathelyne

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Has anyone else here written fictional letters? Its something a few friends and I did when we were 'getting too old' for imaginary games. We used to write letters, but not from us. Usually it was a made up person in an agreed world (ie it could be real world, a fictional world from a book or a movie or a set scenario, my favourite was when a few of us pretended we were at boarding schools, all the schools were different and all while all the details were totally fictitious it was fun to include people we all knew as 'friends' and see if others guessed who we had based them on!) but sometimes we did characters in a favourite book or film.

 

Did anyone else do this? I last wrote one when I was 15 or 16 but have been thinking about it recently as I came accross writing about some (the boarding school ones actually) when I was reading through my old diarys.

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Never done it, but it sounds like a really creative idea!

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I correspond with a friend and we try to keep it in the Jane austen style. We eventually fail half way through the letter, but we do write pages and pages. Letters are such fun. I may try the ficticious character idea with my niece. Thanks for the idea!

Kathy

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There is a role-playing game called De Profundis which is very similar to this. It is set in a Lovecraftian / horror / weird type world, and the characters correspond through letters to actually play the game.

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Yes, I used to do this with one particular correspondent when we were 15 or 16, too. We had an entirely different chain of letters than our usual correspondents, as fictitious Italian men. It was bizarre but wonderful.

 

There is a whole section just for this at The Letter Exchange called Ghost Letters. I gather it's fairly popular.

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There is a role-playing game called De Profundis which is very similar to this. It is set in a Lovecraftian / horror / weird type world, and the characters correspond through letters to actually play the game.

 

Wow...thank you for this. I just looked it up, and plan on throwing it at my gaming group to see if they're interested. :thumbup:

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I did this once many centuries ago as a class assignment. Each member of the class had to write a letter to a character in a book that we had studied that year. I think it was in my freshman English class.

 

There was an author (whose name I can't recall at the moment) who, while suffering from a severe case of writers block wrote a series of letters to an imaginary friend as an effort to break through the block. The author went on to develop the letters into a book that was very popular in the 1970s or some time about then. So, you might set out on this exercise just for fun and have it develop into something more.

-gross

 

Let us endeavor to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. -Mark Twain

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This sounds like a really cool idea! I haven't been able to use my creative juices in a long while, and something like this would work perfectly. I would love to write a letter in the Jane Austen style too but wouldn't mind getting inside the head of Anne of Green Gables or Scarlett O'Hara or Ginny Weasley or Bean (from Ender's Game) or...well you get the point.

 

The LEX website also sounds interesting, too - although I'm a bit reluctant to try it out before hearing about it from someone on here.

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I'm glad I'm not the only person to have done this/found it fun.

 

I used to play a lot of online play by post role playing games, they were fun but there were always time issues (ie you have to wait for at least one other person to make a post for you to reply to, in different timezones this could lead to it taking weeks to describe a short conversation while two other players took half a day to do heaps more because they were in the same timezone, then you are playing with three people and one stops replying, do you wait? Continue? all that stuff) but with letters you could write whenever, and if you hadn't written for a while it was fine to pick up a pen and say "sory I haven't written for ages, here is why" rather than pretnding that there was only a second pause in conversation, not a month, lol.

 

I always love Anne from Anne of Green Gables! I remember one of the books she wrote a lot of letters and complained about a scratchy nib and how she couldn't write love letters with one- hehe

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You might also enjoy the book Freedom and Necessity, an epistolary novel by Emma Bull and Steven Brust; the whole thing is a series of letters between a half-dozen mostly related (fictitious) people (and presumably fictitious versions of some real people, such as Karl Marx) in mid nineteenth century England. It's nominally classified as fantasy, but there's a little bit of everything - adventure, espionage, political intrigue, history, romance, the paranormal - in it, and it mostly defies pigeonholing. It's one of my two or three favorite books.

 

Your Anne of Green Gables comment reminded me of it; in Freedom and Necessity one of the letters includes an apology for being an illegible mess, on account of having to be written using the free public pen, paper, and ink provided at a railway station, rather than the higher-quality materials to which the author - and recipient - were accustomed...

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Don Novello, who played Father Guido Sarducci on SNL and other shows, wrote a series of fictitious and rather funny letters to politicians and corporate heads in the 1970's under the pen name Lazlo Toth, a modification of the name of the crazy who defaced and damaged Michelangelo's Pieta in 1972. He received many serious replies to his letters and published a book of them called The Lazlo Letters. He has followed up with two other books full of similar letters and all are rather funny.

Edited by cakibler

"If A equals success, then the formula is: A = X + Y + Z, X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut."

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

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In a like vein there was a long series of letters from a fictitious British correspondent called Henry Root. Some were very funny indeed. I think several compilations were published.

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I think doing so would be fun, but never have ... Have you read Sorcery and Cecelia, a delightful, if exceedingly frothy, fantasy/Regency-romance mashup? The authors (Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer) claim the novel started from just such a fantasy correspondence.

Edited by lefty928
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Let's see.

 

I am a Nigerian prince. If you will help me transfer 25.3 million dollars out of the country, I will give you ten percent! Of course, I need your bank account info, your PIN number, your SSN, and don't forget your credit card number and security code!

Soli Deo Gloria!

 

Void your warranty, violate a user agreement, fry a circuit, blow a fuse, poke an eye out!

 

 

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Never done it, but it sounds like a really creative idea!

 

I'd like a letter from Captain Picard.

 

Me, too! We could take turns or I'll be Pickard (that ought to be challenging, in a good way) and you can be anybody else you want who isn't Riker.

I came here for the pictures and stayed for the conversation.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'd like a letter from Captain Picard.

 

Make it so! (sorry, I really couldn't resist that)

...For desire is the cruelest pain. -Jill Tracy

Function determines structure. -Dr Glenn Doman

"Left-handers of the world, unite!" -Janus Zarate: League of Left-Handers, brassgoggles.co.uk

 

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I've done fictional letters from time to time; it's one of the recognized ways to tell a story. The set that's gotten the best reviews is embedded in my story titled Pen Pals. I also had a gread deal of fun researching and writing Letters.

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