09:37 (important to anchor timeline)

Thinking about what to post on the blog.

How I got here, what I ate for breakfast, or what my desk looks like, you won’t know yet.

But now you want to know… and you’re in; that’s how it starts.

Love this about epistolary fiction, especially the diary format. No need to stand at the front door of the story, welcoming everyone and showing them around. Readers come in and make their own cup of tea.

10:15

Appreciate that readers don’t expect a grand adventure. Often the story is a record of someone making sense of an ordinary day filled with small details and moments that reveal an emotional landscape. Calorie counting, awkward conversations and failed attempts at self-improvement are compelling enough in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary series because not only are we living in Bridget’s world, but inside her head.

The diary format reminds us that plot isn’t only what happens, but also what matters to a character. A question for you: What ordinary thing in your life would become fascinating if we knew why it mattered to you?

The diary is also a good format for characters with recurring worries and obsessions: weight, school, popularity, money, romance, ageing. What we repeatedly return to tells us something. It may be boring, but it may be an emotional arc in disguise, because beneath an obsession is often a fear, desire, insecurity, longing or grief.

11:45

Humour doesn’t announce itself, but slips in almost by accident. Narrators are funny without trying to be. They report events and interpret (read misinterpret) them, but only readers notice the absurdity.

The gap between what the narrator believes and the reader understands is one of the richest sources of comedy. Case in point: Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole series where Adrian takes himself very seriously. The reader has other ideas, as with Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid range, which captures the immediacy and visual comedic value of the diary form so well.

13:30

Nothing to post.

14:05

So convenient that you can skip the boring bits. There’s such freedom here for the author. Gaps create tension, mystery and emotional resonance.

15:30

Diary fiction isn’t about unedited writing, but about creating the illusion of unedited writing. It appears so simple: a date, time, voice and things going wrong, but it is the character’s voice that truly carries the story. Readers will follow a character through the most ordinary day if the voice is irresistible.

15:45

Seven cups of tea. It’s probably enough for the day.

16:00

It isn’t.

Try it yourself:

• Write a diary entry about today. (Don’t explain your life.)
• Include one insignificant detail.
• Include one thing you haven’t told anyone.
• Tell a story about something that happened where you were reasonable and the other person was not as reasonable. Now imagine the entry in the other person’s diary.
• Read it back tomorrow – perhaps you’re surprised as to what your entry was trying to tell you.

Photo by Prophsee Journals on Unsplash