June 19th - I had only got as far as the top of the stairs when...

Alexis Smith as Marian in The Woman in White, 1948

I've been thinking about diaries again: fictional ones, real ones and the ones the fall somewhere in between.

It's partly because I'm at the very, very, earliest stage of a new novel - the vaguely planning to plan a vague plan stage* - and I'm wondering whether to do it (or part of it) in diary form.

I can think of plenty of upsides to writing a fictionalised diary. There's the intimacy of looking over the narrator's shoulder as she sits there, hunched up in bed in her pyjamas, scribbling away. There's the excitement of feeling that the story is happening now; that the narrator is never more than a couple of steps ahead of the reader. There's the way the diarist's perspective is severely limited to the here, the now and the personal - i.e. you can't use retrospective or omniscient wisdom to colour in character and events - which seems to me like a helpful discipline when you're looking to tell a story economically and well.

The main downside of the fictionalised diary (that I can think of) is its artificiality, especially if it's part of a very plot-driven novel. Whilst writing this post I've been flipping through my old copy of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. I have such fond memories of reading it aged 15, and in particular the severe diary-envy I suffered whilst reading the melodramatic section that is Marian Halcombe's journal. How come Marian's journal had such a strong narrative drive? How come mine just drifted about from non-event to non-event?  Here is one of Marian's typical daily offerings:

June 19th - I had only got as far as the top of the stairs when the locking of Laura's door suggested to me the precaution of also locking my own door, and keeping the key safely about me while I was out of the room. My journal was already secured with other papers in the table drawer, but my writing materials were left out. These included a seal, bearing the common device of two doves drinking out of the same cup, and some sheets of blotting paper, which had the impression on them of the closing lines of my writing in these pages traced during the past night. Distorted by the suspicion which had now become a part of myself, even such trifles as these looked too dangerous to be trusted without a guard....  

 

As diaries go, it's a far cry from Got up, had breakfast... I was convinced that the fault lay with me and my capacity for writing the wrong bits of life down. Only later on did it dawn on me that Marian Halcombe's diary is A Literary Device.

 

In times of great crisis - when, say, you're urgently trying to work out how to rescue your sister from a lunatic asylum where she's been consigned by her evil husband, having been forced to swap identities with a dead woman to whom she bears an uncanny but as yet unexplained resemblance - are you likely to sit down at regular intervals to write a detailed literary account of everything that's going on, including verbatim accounts of lengthy conversations that will, though you don't know it yet, turn out to be profoundly significant? Are you going to be able to select the details that are relevant to your story and edit out those that aren't, even as they're happening? How do you know that the fact Sir Percival paced uneasily round the drawing room after breakfast is highly suspicious, but the fact he had an extra glass of wine last night is not worth mentioning?

So that's the artificiality problem. But does it matter? It doesn't spoil The Woman in White for me, not even now I'm grown-up and more attuned to such things.

Yes, but just because you can shrug it off in a Victorian novel doesn't mean it wouldn't irritate in a twenty-first century one...

Then again, all fiction is selective and artificial by definition, so why should a melodramatic diary be particularly problematic?

I don't (in case you hadn't guessed) know. But it's the sort of thing I have fun thinking about.


*I love that stage of planning, when absolutely anything is an option and maybe, just maybe, this novel is going to be the next War and Peace. Well, why not? It isn't until I start getting tangible words down onto tangible bits of paper that I come back down to earth with a bump.