To Diarise or not to Diarise.

I have been considering starting a new experimental blog and I honestly don’t know if I should or not. Let me explain me idea, and then any thoughts you may have will be gratefully received.

All authors will tell you that one of the key ways to improve as a writer is to write. Anything. Just write. It’s why I write on this blog. I really don’t expect anyone to read the rubbish I spew on these pages – but I don’t write on them for that reason. I do it as practice. Writing practice.

Now, some will say that it’s a waste of time. Instead of writing on this blog, I could be writing or editing actual fiction – real stories which will (I hope) be destined for publication. Personally, I don’t believe that. I believe that every word you write, no matter where you write it or what it’s about, is all good. So if I don’t feel that I can write high quality prose or string together so top notch dialogue, I write something else – anything else – and it quite often ends up here.

Of course, the other reason I write on here is that sometimes I just have stuff I need to get off my chest and these pages are a convenient place.

So, in the spirit of ‘all writing is good no matter what it is’, I’ve been thinking about a new blog. Not a blog to replace this one – I enjoy writing this one too much. But a second, supplemental blog.

It will be, essentially, a diary. A “What I did today” diary. But not my diary. It will be the diary of a fictional person. And the events in the diary will be fictional. All the other people in the diary will be fictional too. In other words, it’ll be a narrative without end. A serial if you like. What do you think? Sound like a good idea?

My plan would be to write diary entries as the mood takes me on the blog and then post several entries together as chapters in an SOL archive of the ‘story’. So it would be raw, mostly unedited, fiction, given away for free.

Okay, I admit, there is an element of marketing here too. I would naturally hope that if the diary draws people in and they like what they read, they might consider buying my books too.

This is still very much ‘an idea’ at present. I have no clue who the diarist would be, what his life would be like, or what the direction of the plot (such as there is one) would be. I’d be ‘flying by the seat of my pants’ to a large degree.

So should I go for it? You thoughts if you please.