At Christmas 2019 I received a diary. Having mostly used a web-based diary for a few years (and not having many appointments in it anyway), I wondered what to do with it.

In the end I decided to commit to writing something each day – a short story of some kind. This would go towards achieving the One Weird Rule That All Successful Writers Adhere To:

1. They write

I don’t write enough, so this was my way of making sure that changed.

And, somehow, I managed it.

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I did two stories after midnight, and one Saturday story I forgot, in October. But apart from that – success!

The rules of Story Diary

I wanted to make this as easy as possible for myself. I wanted to write without committing to showing anyone. I just wanted to up the amount of practice I get. I wanted to be able to sit down every day and just write, not overthink, and not need to plan. If it was rubbish, I would just fill the page and move on the next day. No one would ever know!

And yet here I am: I’m pleased with how a lot them came out, and so the best ones will be published on this site. They’ll be largely unchanged from the diary, except for stylistic edits and improvements.

The published stories

Many of the stories are little more than expanded ideas (often from a small notebook I keep for little ideas). I let myself leave them ‘unfinished’ in this way, because I didn’t want to force myself towards any end goal each day.

Some of the stories are part of a theme, or a fictional ‘universe’. I’ll try grouping them if I publish them here.

The future

This worked so well that I’m carrying on with a 2021 diary (thanks again, in-laws!), except that I’m going to try writing a whole novel, a day at a time. Who knows whether it’ll produce anything of value? But as long as I’m writing every day, I’m achieving my aim, so I’ll keep going.

The Stories

All the stories will be published under the tag Diary2020, so read on:

Stories from the 2020 Story Diary