Stories are everywhere. For some, it’s easier to say once upon a time than to talk about the truth, but they are able to weave their own truths into the stories that they tell. Journals delve deeply into the mind, but that doesn’t mean they cannot delve deeply into a mind that has been created from nothing.
Journals are magical wonderlands where you can explore your own thoughts, examine how you feel about a situation, or record important ideas for later. Journaling rocks for storytelling just as much as it does for recording the truth. Powerful books like The Color Purple, Dracula, and Go Ask Alice were books presented in diary form.
Once you decide that your journal will be fiction, new worlds open up. Whether you’re talking about handling fantastic situations, approaching real life events as a fictional character, or making things up entirely, your journal becomes the portal to something new. How can you create a fictitious journal?
What do you write about in a fictional journal?
The best stories are rooted somewhere in truth, but the audience doesn’t have to know where that truth is. Being the author, you will know where that truth is, and you can learn from it. Here are some places the truth can hide in a fictitious journal:
- Write about fiction from your personal perspective
- Write about real events from a fictitious persona
- Tell truths that you may have just learned from a storytelling perspective
- Embellish real events that happened in your life
- Write about fake people and fake events, but use a code to mark what’s real
Like an art journal, the fiction journal is your own creation. Let loose with what you’re thinking about and how you can make the most impact on the person who will be reading it in the future (whether it’s you or someone else).
How should you write in a fictional journal?
This actually applies to real journals and fake journals. Write so that the person reading your journal can understand what is happening. Can you, when you reread what you’ve written, grasp what’s going on? If not, can you write more notes to fully explain the situation? The more detail you write, the more ability you’ll have to affect someone reading the journal in the future.
Like in all fiction, adjectives and adverbs are the keys to creating great detail. There is a huge imagery difference between moist and rain-drenched. Hungry and famished. Black and velvet darkness. If you’re new to creating fiction, you may want to go to the reference section of your local bookstore and pick up some primers on fiction writing. Don’t let their content hold you back either. Use them to knock off any rough edges in your writing.
If you really want to make your fictional journal top-notch, you might want to write your entries on a computer at first. That way you can do your editing with ease and put the final product into the real journal. This lets you shape your personal thoughts while leaving the journal free from editing marks and errors.
Fictions often expose the truth, and a great story is something that all of us need to hear. Are you up to the challenge?