Fictional Diary

I keep a journal next to my bed, where I record my thoughts and feelings and hopes and frustrations on a near-daily basis.

I don’t know if it’s a diary per say, as almost everything in it is made up. I take whatever happens to me during the day, and by night, I convert them into absurd and fantastic tales that only vaguely resembles my thoughts in reality.

People become characters, or concepts. Events become plot points. My thoughts become soliloquies, or conversations. It makes it easier for me to write about myself; I don’t like having to recall bad memories, nor do I want to put down on paper anything about my friends that they wouldn’t want to appear online. That, and I have a fascination with blade weapons, which don’t exactly appear often in real life. It gives me a good excuse to make every conflict into a sword fight, at the very least.

I am instinctively uncomfortable with writing real events. I feel like they should be just a part of memories, locked away, and shared only in person if the time is right. Putting those memories down on paper doesn’t sit well with me. Even if that paper is never published, I can’t get rid of the feeling that it is not something that I should be doing.

So everything I write here is deliberately vague, or twisted somehow. Even the reflections on my own life has to be broken somehow, or else I wouldn’t write it down. Everything I put down in my journal is fantasized beyond belief, into grand tales of adventure or parables or conversations between characters. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Life is a lot more interesting, looking back in my journal logs, when you’re capable of creating something greater out of experience.

The good thing is that it still preserves my memories, while giving me ideas for writing fiction. The bad thing is that I’ll be disappointed if I have to write a story without a good sword fight or two – in other words, anything realistic in the modern day.

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