For the past few years I’ve been working on a series of spy thrillers. The protagonist is a covert agent named Kevin Lone, who works for a quasi-secret Beltway firm called Mars Risk Management (MRM). I’m currently seeking a publisher for “Avita Doesn’t Love You,” in which Lone battles a North Korean spy ring that is using a religious cult as a front.

The novel is written in an epistolary format. This means that it’s presented as a collection of third-party texts including newspaper and Internet accounts, MRM internal reports, and journals kept by the protagonists. A classic novel of the epistolary format is Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Here’s why I chose to write using this approach.

1. It takes me, the author, out of the equation. This is not my story, nor am I the omniscient narrator who reveals information to the reader. My flair as a writer is not the issue. I’m just the editor. I like it that way. I’m a big fan of Andy Warhol, who took the same approach.

2. It allows every character to assert themselves in the first person, much like the characters in a play. To me this is very important when moral issues are being discussed. For example, a key character is a North Korean spy named Hannah Minh. To me, it was important that her story be heard directly from her own lips. Not that this would excuse her crimes, but it would make her a human being and not just a cartoon character. Likewise, the “co-star” of the book along with Kevin Lone is a college-aged woman named Jessica Kenney, who fearlessly and perhaps foolishly embarks on a dangerous journey to avenge her father’s death. I wanted her to be able to tell her story in her own words.

3. Much of the book consists of Kevin Lone’s reports submitted to his boss, Lucy Gatling. But as we all know, reports tend to be factual. There are certain things you don’t say in a report to your boss. In the interviews with Kevin Lone that are also included, he speaks much more freely (in literary terms, he speaks in a different voice). We learn much more than if we just read the reports.

4. Perhaps most importantly, nowadays people get their information from multiple sources. When I was a kid we had Walter Cronkite. If Walter Cronkite said it, that was all you needed to know. The days of the single-voice news source are over. We get our news from TV, newspapers, blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and countless other sources. No one person has a claim to objectivity or to the “truth.” The same goes for the narrator of a story. There cannot be one truth as revealed by the omniscient narrator. Like it or not, we live in an era of multiple truths. To me, the only way to acknowledge this is to step back and let the characters report the story in their own words. Is this more challenging for the reader? Perhaps, but I hope that it’s also more rewarding.