Diaries: About the Medium, How You Write it, and Reasons it May Fail Your Story
What is a Medium?
Click HERE to read more about story mediums.
What is a Diary?
Do you ever look at someone and wonder, “what is going on inside their head?” There are few narrative mediums more personal than the diary. As an audience, you’re literally inside the protagonists head. You feel what they feel, you do what they do.
Unlike other narrative mediums, story structure is loose in a diary. Life doesn’t adhere to a narrative structure, but sometimes things happen that feel like a good story. This is where diaries live.
They’re often told over the course of days, with each day being occupied by a different ‘chapter’. Details may wander as the protagonist charts what they found to be important about the previous day.
They could discuss:
Daily events
World events
Perspectives
Observations
Appointments
Goal tracking
Personal goals
Creative scribblings
Random musings
And more!
Diaries can be handwritten or typed into a word processor (but not put on a blog, that’s another medium for another day). Days could be missing, or one day can have multiple entries.
Fictional diaries are a way of truly experiencing the psychology of a character, getting literally under their skin and ultimately see the world of your story in a very specific light.
Examples of Diaries
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Piranesi – Susanna Clarke
Dracula – Bram Stoker (partial use)
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell (partial use) (no, not that David Mitchell)
The Diary of a Nobody – George & Weedon Grossmith
Benefits of Writing for Diaries
Get in the head of your Protagonist
There’s a certain joy in getting into the head of your protagonist, even if it’s just a writing exercise. The way they see a scene very often justifies the way they act in it. The simple act of being bumped on the street by a passing stranger can cause a spiral into a deep depression and some questionable decisions being made.
Told as part of a drama, you’d be compelled to write not just that story, but countless others as you’re told by producers and directors that you need to give the other actors something to do.
Even if you’re telling a story from the first-person perspective, there’s an expectation of editing to suit narrative convention. But using a diary to get into the head of your protagonist, they become blissfully unedited.
This is them, warts and all.
Maximum Audience Engagement
Of course, if you’re getting under the skin of your protagonist, you’re also welcoming your audience to do the same. Once your audience is in the skin, they will wear it as comfortably (or uncomfortably) as if it were their own.
With that much intimate engagement, you’re priming an audience to read / watch / play / experience the next instalment. You’re not just telling the story of your protagonist anymore, you’re telling the audience what happens to them.
Structure Flexibility
All stories have a beginning, middle, and end. No satisfying book ends mid-sentence. But there is flexibility in your structure when writing a diary. With one hand on the wheel, driving you leisurely to the natural conclusion of your story, you can take all the time you want or need to indulge in the sub-plots, side quests, and other events that make up your protagonists day.
Of course, the best narrative experiences sneakily make even the most inconsequential moment integral to the conclusion, but who’s to say that this diary is the conclusion of your overall story?
The point is if your character misses their bus to school one day, that’s absolutely fine! These things happen to real people, and real is the one thing your diary must be.
Using Unreliable Narration to Build Suspense
We’ve all read old diaries and thought “you idiot, that’s not what happened at all!” We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. In some mediums, unreliable narrators are a scary prospect, but in a diary it’s a veritable playground.
If you are writing an unreliable narrator, which of course you should in a diary, the one thing to remember is that every lie is true at the time, and it’s true for a reason.
Their mum is a bitch because…
It’s not their fault their headphones broke because…
It all comes back to character. Have your protagonist catch themselves in a lie, and ignore it. Maybe they lose their phone because it was stolen on the bus. Then, two days later, they talk about taking their phone from their bag and throwing it in the bin. Without connecting the two, the audience will piece together that there’s something going on. Something sinister? The only way to find out is to keep reading…
Gap in the Market
A lot of the examples listed above are… old. Yes, Bridget Jones’s Diary is an old book now. That means that writing a diary can go one of two ways. It could be lost in obscurity, or it could revive the genre.
Ever the optimist, I refer you to my main article on mediums, where I stress the point that if your story is a diary, then write a diary. It might not make you a millionaire overnight, but it will stand the test of time better than shoehorning it into a medium where it doesn’t belong!
Drawbacks of Writing for Diaries
Minimal Audience Reach
Hi, remember that last point about being an optimist? Well, the future is uncertain and writing a diary could be an exercise in futility. Writing is an art, but publishing is a business. Right now, the market for a diary isn’t there.
(sneaking in here with some optimism – thriller genre books do very well, so what’s to stop you introducing this medium to a mass market by sneaking into a genre they already love?)
Losing Your Story in the Weeds of Character (getting distracted with subplots)
Yes, okay, your character has missed the bus. They’ve done it every day this week. Their character is one where things like that happen a lot. In a story about one woman’s view on the collapse of British policing, however, it can be boring to repetitively cover this character flaw.
Just because you have the luxury of looser narrative rules, it doesn’t mean they don’t apply. Audiences won’t mind if you stop and take in the view, but leaving them without a narrative anchor will just make them put the story down and walk away.
Audience Grating Against Unreliable Narration
Returning to the lost/hidden phone. You can get away with one or two instances of toying with an unreliable narrator, but if the phone spends one day lost, the next in a bag, a third as if nothing happened, and a fourth being replaced, audiences will become rightfully irritated.
To use a flowery metaphor: Sow the seeds, but don’t drown them before they flower.
The Days When Nothing Happens
Similarly, to point two, there can be a risk of overindulging in the mundane. Sometimes a Monday is just a Monday. It’s that horrid day after a weekend where you drag yourself to work and there’s nothing to eat when you get home. It’s not exactly going to propel the narrative forward.
There are some clever ways around this. Some days, people just don’t write in their diary. Other days are omitted, but this could imply there’s something important the doesn’t want the reader to know yet.
Keeping the dull days to a minimum will keep the momentum of your story going, but their inclusion will remind your reader that this could be a real person.
Tricky.
Unable to Explore Outside Your Protagonist
Of course, being so contained in the mind of your protagonist, there’s not much room to objectively explore the motives and actions of other characters.
So, if you’re looking to use a diary to tell a sweeping ensemble piece, you may be looking in the wrong place.
If, however, you’ve got your ensemble piece, and you want to get inside the head of one of those characters you felt was underserved, well come on in, grab a notebook, and get writing!
Building a Shared Universe? Pair With These 4 Other Mediums
VR Film
Letters / Correspondence
Solo Show
Podcast (Panel)
