Rebuilding A Story

Writing it as a series of diary entries would make the story seem less immediate and visceral IMO. The exact HOW you build it depends on the story you're going to tell.

Turn diary entries into scenes? "Today I met George Clooney" would become "I was driving along the scenic route past Lake Como when I saw George Clooney sitting in a boat. The sun was shining and it was very hot." etc.

you can just record the dialogue if you want - it's not quite realistic but you can get away with it in books.

For a book that does this well, check out Tangerine by Edward Bloor. It's kidlit but it's a really great novel fullstop.

Tangerine is styled after a boy's journal. It has dialogue. At the end, it says that he went back through it to "novelise" it (that's his cover for why it doesn't quite read like journal entries).

It might be a good idea to map out the entries you have right now in an outline and pick up the narrative thread that's woven throughout them -- it might help you to see your plot more clearly. Writing a first person novel would translate well from diary entries where the character is already speaking about themselves in the first person, though. Maybe you could think of writing in first person as writing a more elaborate series of diary entries (chapters) that are less limiting than sounding like your character is actually writing things down?

I definitely recommend reading widely in your genre, too! That helps you see how other authors frame their stories and gives you a better sense of how to write your own.

Please don't post duplicate threads in forums. I'll be merging threads shortly.

Yanna said:

Hey guys! So, i have an idea that I've been sitting on and I've started working on it but I'm thinking of starting over. The concept is currently written in diary form written by a girl who's facing current events, like racism, injustice and others. I'm finding it hard to place in dialogue that my character has with other people. With that being said, I've thought to just rebuild the story and rewrite it as if i'm writing a novel. I'm just not sure how to do it. Any ideas?

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It isn't easy to advise you without knowing how far you've gotten with the diary entries. Depending on how much and what you have so far, you might be able to take the entries and use those to build scenes for a novel. It would be an interesting way to outline, but effective, I think; it could work well if you have sufficient work done on it already. Just a thought.

I'm writing a story in a diary format. I'm including both conversations written out like in a novel (direct speech, formatted with a new line for each speaker, etc) and also paragraphs that summarise a conversation. The former is for longer, more important conversations and the latter is for short conversations, or long ones that can be summarised in a sentence or two (e.g. "we talked about the rugby"). I find that too much indirect speech can get tiresome and it's hard to stop the paragraph from being a list of "and then I said" "and then she said" etc etc.

The potential issues with a diary with fully formatted conversations is that a) the person writing the diary may not remember the exact words and b) they might not bother to format the conversations properly - indirect speech tends to be more diary-like, however IMO it's not implausible that someone can remember the main parts of important conversations and know how to write them out properly.

I'd agree that it'd be a good idea to break it down into scenes and work from there. That way, you won't feel daunted.

Just my two cents!