A nice device - Karen Bush
Sometimes only pen and ink will do ... Boswell, Johnson, Pepys, Anne Frank, Captain Scott, Nella Last - not to mention the fictional Adrian Mole, Charles Pooter and Bridget Jones ... Yes, the link between them all as you've probably guessed, is diaries, which seems rather appropriate considering the time of year. A new diary used to be a regular gift item each Christmas, with all the promise of the year ahead waiting to be filled in on those inviting blank pages. Diary entries are of course a wonderful device for novelists, allowing you to skip over the boring bits and get straight into the action on every page, as well as into the mind of the protagonist; and if you aren't great at description, it neatly lets you off that particular hook too. Where real people are concerned though, they provide an insight into the lives not just of both ordinary and extraordinary people caught up in the events of their age, but a glimpse of the mundane, every day existence which w...