I know that rules are not meant to be hard-and-fast, as I said in another post this month, but I still can't help wondering how, if at all, I have "violated" some of the "rules" presented by different guides to writing. Just a day or two ago, I came across this one on writing a diary novel:

5 Challenges to Writing a Diary Novel

1. Readers must suspend disbelief. 

Most people don’t keep diaries. Those that do don’t often write extensive, frequent entries. And chances are, in order to tell a good story, your protagonist needs to do just that. We’re talking full scenes with description and dialogue instead of telling briefly what happened.

Your job as a writer is to make both the voice and the story so engaging that the reader doesn’t stop to wonder whether the character would really take the time to write all of this in her diary.

2. It’s difficult to include backstory and explanations. 

If a character is writing a diary, she is essentially writing something for herself. Therefore, why would she need to tell herself about something that happened in the past? Instead she might write, “going to Grandma’s was just as bad as last time,” without going into detail about what happened last time. After all, she already knows. Perhaps she even wrote about it previously in her journal.

Your character also might not take the time to fully describe people or places. Why would she bother to describe to her diary her mother’s appearance, or what her bedroom looks like?

Your job as a writer is to find a way to tell the story vividly while still staying true to the diary format. One way to get around this challenge is to write an epistolary novel (a novel in letters) instead of a diary novel. If your protagonist is writing to another person, it makes sense that she would do more explaining and describing.

One book that finds a way to overcome this challenge is The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. It’s essentially a diary-style novel, but the entries are written as letters that the narrator sends to an anonymous person. Here’s the very first page:

Dear friend,

I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn’t try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have. Please don’t try to figure out who she is because then you might figure out who I am, and I really don’t want you to do that. I will call people by different names or generic names because I don’t want you to find me. I didn’t enclose a return address for the same reason. I mean nothing bad by this. Honest.

So that’s one way to do it.

3. Grammar and style gets tricky. 

If your protagonist is a teen or preteen, are you going to write the way a kid that age would actuallywrite? Yes and no. You don’t want to include all the spelling and grammatical mistakes your protagonist would likely make in real life because that would make for annoying reading. Instead, you’re going to write using the rules of the English language and find other ways (word choice, sentence style, content, etc.) to make the diary seem realistic.

You want to indent your paragraphs and use quotation marks for dialogue. You don’t want to use ten exclamation points even though that’s what a real teenager writing in a real diary might do. In the same way that you shouldn’t write dialogue exactly the way people speak (with all the “ums” and “likes”) you also don’t need the entries to be exactly the way your character would write them.  After all, this is a work of fiction.  You’re not trying to create an accurate representation a teenager’s diary; you’re simply using the diary as a device to tell a story.

There are plenty of ways to make the diary feel real without resorting to misspelled words, all-caps, and ovelry-exuberant punctuation.  The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is scattered throughout with cartoons that have been drawn by the narrator and look like they have been taped into the book.  In Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews, the narrator, teenage movie buff and aspiring director Greg Gaines, writes out scenes of his life as if they are screenplays. In this way, Alexie and Andrews give their books a unique “diary feel” without breaking grammar rules.

4. Tense can get tricky.   

When you’re writing a diary novel, you have to think about when your character is sitting down to write these entries. Is she writing about what happened that day… or yesterday? Is she writing once a week about the whole week? She might be feeling a certain way right now (present tense) about something that happened yesterday (past tense) or about something that’s going to happen tomorrow (future tense).

This challenge isn’t too hard to manage, but what if you want your character to be more reflective about her experiences; what if you want her to be making some realizations that she might not make in the moment? Or, what if it’s unrealistic that your character would have been chronicling things on a day to day basis? Maybe she didn’t have time.  Maybe she didn’t realize until after the fact that something big and important was happening to her. Maybe, instead of writing diary entries, she could instead be looking back from a certain vantage point and writing about an important time in her life.

Of course, if you’re writing YA or Middle Grade, the narrator in this case should still be young and looking back on something that happened fairly recently. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger andWe Were Liars by E. Lockhart both do this. In The Catcher and Rye, for example, Holden is writing an account of the recent past: “I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.”

This can be a good alternative to the diary novel.

5.  A diary novel lends itself to telling instead of showing. 

Think about how you might have written a diary entry as an angsty teen. Something like this, perhaps:

Oh my god, I HATE Linda right now. She is being such a BITCH!!!!!! She told EVERYBODY at the bus stop I wasn’t wearing deodorant, and they all laughed at me and called me a stinky pig. I’m seriously not talking to her anymore. She SUUUUCKS and is officially no longer my friend!!!!!!!!

First of all, I don’t think I’d want to read a whole book like this, riddled with excessive explanation points and all-caps.  Secondly, in most books, this would be a scene, right? We’d be at the bus stop with Linda and the protagonist. We’d get a little description of the other kids. We’d get the dialogue of what was said. We’d be SHOWN the bitchiness of Linda instead of being TOLD about it. Although it’s fine to have some telling in a diary novel, you really have to include scenes and dialogue.

When writing a diary novel, you have to continually walk the line of making it seem like a diary, yet making it an engaging story.  Not an easy thing to do.

So, have I been doing it the "right" way or is the way I have been doing it "wrong"? Again, rules will are meant to be broken, and the above guidelines are just that--guidelines. I found myself using past tense, but at one point using the present. I don't know if that was intended, rather I just think I made a typo 🙂  Someone from the writing group I have been attending pointed out that a shift in tense can be distracting. Upon reading this, I decided just to change it all to the past tense, since that was how I'd begun the whole story. 

Many times I have been told to "show, not tell." And I have done my best to include scenes and dialogue. And I have tried to avoid using improper grammar, even to imply that kids are talking that way.

And if someone were to insist that I'm not doing a "diary" novel, but a general "epistolary" one, I would be fine with that. I wanted to try the epistolary format, and this was how I chose to do it. Again, no rule for writing is ever hard-and-fast.