: Re: What are some disadvantages of writing fiction in a diary format? I find writing in a diary-style is the easiest way to write fiction. The format is the same as a diary, with each entry beginning

@Lee1909368

The "diary entry" format is not very immersive. It's hard to give believably the most immersive parts of classic prose - following given events step by step, line by line, each breath, frown and smirk. It's all a retrospection from earlier events of the day, compressed into a diary entry format, so it's never this detailed. This alone would probably be quite enough to discourage most authors.

Next comes the matter of fitting it in. The (meta-)writer must be a type to write one, and simultaneously interesting enough to be worth reading enough. Combining these two in a whole novel formatted as a journal is rare.

The format is stifling and gives little in exchange for the cost. You need to have it planned out in time - where a novel skips two months, the journal needs a filler. Where the novel has the protagonist striped of all possessions and locked up, the journal needs them to retain the journal. Where the novel has them keep a deadly secret that can never be written, the journal can't have it written down, or it would show them as reckless.

Still, the format is liked and is common as "fast forward" mode, as day summaries, as a retrospection on last days of a deceased. It is popular and a very powerful tool, but rarely used on scale of full novel - a chapter, a section, a retrospection, something to break the pacing - it's common to interweave short scenes of very intense action with journal entries of days preceding the events. It's not nearly as rare as you believe, it's just usually served as a side dish, not the main course.

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: The best place I can suggest to turn to with this kind of open questions - on military and weapons - is 4chan/k/. It's an imageboard gathering fans of all things connected with weapons of

: Re: What are some disadvantages of writing fiction in a diary format? I find writing in a diary-style is the easiest way to write fiction. The format is the same as a diary, with each entry beginning

More posts by @Lee1909368

: Learning storywriting for videogames - Handling deep nonlinearities A recent question asked for pointers for writing for games, and the gist of the answers was that it's not very unlike writing

: Should a long flashback be written in first or third person? In my novel there will be a chapter-length flashback as one character relates a story from his past. The rest of the novel is

: How to have a character be nameless for the first few paragraphs of a book? Let me first explain what is going in in the beginning of the story: My main character belongs to a tribal culture

: The best place I can suggest to turn to with this kind of open questions - on military and weapons - is 4chan/k/. It's an imageboard gathering fans of all things connected with weapons of

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