Writing and Expressing your views

What you make with your diary depends on many things.

You may be using the stuffs for personal development - to understand yourself better through the aim recording of your story. Or you may utilize it as a alone resource for your fiction writing, recording narratives drawn from life - your ain and other people's. You may compose down conversations overheard on public transport, or in the pub, or at the doctor's surgery. And you can turn all this into a narrative without end - writing this in day-to-day or weekly installments until it turns into a volume of anecdotes with its ain subjects and enhanced with images, sketches and physical objects whether discarded tablet packages or sea-shells.

From either of these sorts of diary you have got thoughts and short letters which will do your fiction and your autobiographical non-fiction authentic. And this volition grade out your writing's alone merchandising point - its individual 'voice'.

When you come up to reexamine your materials, of course, other issues go significant.

OK. Sol you've had an interesting life; your diaries are waiting to be mined for information; your household and friends are clamoring for 'the book'. What next?

Autobiography is now an industry and - as with any other sort of authorship - certain regulations underpin success. Even if you are thinking of self-publication, consideration of these tin do all the difference between a book people desire to read and a book that stands neglected on the shelf.

Your reader - the audience - is as ever in pole position. Who are you telling your narrative to? This volition order what words and looks you employ. Would you, for example, desire your female parent to read what you compose for your friends?

And then, there's the thorny issue of what you include and what you go forth out.

The fast one lies in the vexed issue of goal-setting. A recent visit to a writers' grouping left me convinced that not one among the seven people who read their 'stuff' out had the least thought about goal-setting, either for their literary calling or for their individual project. Planning for this grouping was bete noire and so was review. People wrote what came into their caputs with no thought of where to travel with it. The consequent prose extracts were shapeless, unstructured and cliché-ridden. Their stuff was natural beyond belief - although not irretrievable. And their goal, if any, was to bask their writing. So - in that sense - they had achieved one goal. And yet - in malice of all this - they still hoped that publication would happen.