I hate diaries.  I’ve never been able to keep one.  So I may not be the best person to review a blog that reads like a diary, but is in fact fiction.  That’s me, acknowledging my own bias as a reader.

However, I love fiction.  It’s part of my leisure time, my favourite hobby, and also played a major part in my education.  A fictional blog could be interesting, right? 

Yes, if you’re reading Alexandra Erin’s "Wallflower Report," which is narrated by the fictional person Ariella Wallflower, who’s kind of crazy.  "Charlotte" is not like that.  You could almost believe she’s a real person, if not for the fact that this is labelled fiction.

What’s wrong with that?  It means it reads like a diary.  And I hate diaries, remember?  It’s times like these that I feel the need to explain basic writing conventions, which I hate doing.

First, know your medium.  A "novel" is a long piece of fiction, written in the first or third person (usually), with characters, setting, and plot.  A "diary" is a journal that people write down a day’s events, or their thoughts and feelings.  Real lives have people, not characters, and places, not settings.  And there’s no plot, just life.  A "blog" is a similar type of writing that takes place on the internet.  With me so far?

But each one is very different.  Bloggers can link to other sites, share pictures or cartoons or videos that they like.  They are on random topics that suit the writers’ moods.  "Charlotte" claims to be a fictional blog by a recent high school graduate, but it reads like a traditional, straightforward diary, which doesn’t use the internet/blog medium to its fullest advantage.  For example, blogs have comment features.  So does this story.  But the author/Charlotte rarely answers her comments that I’ve noticed, and a real blogger would.  Further, she doesn’t answer them in character, which ruins using the blog as a medium.  The Charlotte character mentions a website where she collects photos; a real blog would link to it and display them.  Blog fiction should use the web just as well, if not better, than your average person’s real blog.

So this isn’t really a fictional blog.  It’s either a diary or a novel.  Does that make a difference?  It sure does.  Diaries, by their nature, are declarative.  People use them to tell themselves about their own lives.  "I kissed so-and-so, it was awesome!"  or "Today I drove Dad’s car for the first time!"  In writing, we call this "telling."  Normal people "tell" stories to themselves and others all the time.

But good fiction doesn’t rely heavily on the declarative, or telling.  It shows.  It describes.  It evokes.  A good novelist doesn’t say "I kissed so-and-so."  They write "I stroked my fingers through her hair gently, pushing an errant curl back behind her ear.  I leaned in and pressed my lips softly to the corner of her mouth . . . "  Novels paint pictures with words. 

A novel also has a plot, with structure.  Diaries don’t have structure, they have that day’s events, as interpreted by the person that experienced them.  Random daily occurrences that add up to a life, but not a story.

"Charlotte" attempts to impose a plot on the diary format:  it starts with her graduating high school, and then several chapters flashing back over her relationship with a boy named Paul.  Immediately, this ruins the diary medium—because, if she keeps a diary, she’s already logged all those events for herself.  She doesn’t need a recap.  Only a novel’s readers would need the recap, because those events would be relevant to the plot.  That’s not how a diary is written.

A realistic fictional diary lacks the evocative power of a novel.  If you want to write a novel, write one.  But the diary form isn’t well-suited for it.  "Charlotte" is caught somewhere in the middle, as the declarative prose tries to be as evocative as a novel, but falls short, and yet it doesn’t fully embrace either the blog or diary format. 

I think the author could write a good novel.  Or a good diary.  Or even an interesting blog.  But all three at once doesn’t work, at least not for me.  If they ever choose the right medium and find the right way to tell their story, I’ll be interested to see it.

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