Not Tropeworthy: Diary

Diary is defined as when a diary exists in a work. That's it. Nothing in the description seems to refer to anything tropeworthy about diaries on their own. Discussion on the Wick Check thread raised concerns about the trope, and I decided to start a wick check which I, War Jay 77, and Walk In Shadows did. Full results are in the link, but here's the quick totals:

• 26/50 wicks, or 52%, just mentioned the existence of a diary with no/not much other context,
• 12/50 wicks, or 24%, referred to a narration or writing style in the form of a diary,
• 9/50 wicks, or 18%, were used in other ways that I didn't really see any patterns in, and
• 3/50 wicks, or 6%, were unclassifiable.

As mentioned in the quick totals, while many wicks were indeed just mentions of the existence of a diary, we noticed that several wicks (12/50 actually) referred to diary-style writing or narration. Some of the 9/50 other wicks mentioned diaries being used in various different ways, ranging from exposition to various different uses by characters.

My proposed solution would be to disambiguate Diary into various other diary-related tropes, and either yard or TLP the idea of "diary-style writing." What does everyone else think?

I am good with disambiguating diary and taking "diary writing style" to the TLP.

Disambig.

Disambig and split off the writing style trope

Disambiguated and TLP “Diary-Style Narration”.

Wait, do we not have Epistolary Narrative?

ETA: We do, although the site defines it much more rigidly than it's usually used. Epistolary Novel would encompass fiction written as a diary, too, and I think we should just update the description to accurate reflect that definition as is used...everywhere else, and fold those examples into it.

We do not need to Yard the idea, as we actually already have it.

Edited by Eiryu on Feb 25th 2022 at 3:19:20 AM

^ That sounds good. We can fold diary-style examples into that trope

I support this and would add Apocalyptic Log as another trope for the disambiguation page.

Changing my vote to that.

Epistolary Novel's description skews heavily toward letters (since the examples are mostly letters), so it can be edited to say the diary is another common format.

Edited by Tabs on Feb 25th 2022 at 1:25:01 AM

Yeah, our description will need to be cleaned up a tad, but even The Other Wiki specifically calls out diaries as a common form. We’ll just be adjusting to how the term is used.

Edited by Eiryu on Feb 25th 2022 at 3:26:21 AM

Changing my vote from disambig and TLP/yard to disambig and 's solution.

Yeah, I overlooked Epistolary Novel because it was so focused on letters that I didn't even consider expanding it. If we can do that, then let's do.

I agree that Epistolary Novel should be expanded beyond letters, including applicable Diary examples.

I'm retracting my TLP/Yard vote since Yes, We DO Have This One. I'm still in favor of disambiguating.

We have Scrapbook Story (which is about stories that use in-universe documents as a framing device for text) in addition to Epistolary Novel, and the former lists at least one example (Dracula) that contains text written in the form of diary entries.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 25th 2022 at 4:06:07 AM

Sounds alright

Maybe we could word the list on the disambiguation page like this:

• Apocalyptic Log, a way of providing backstory for a doomed person in the form of records written by them, such as diary entries.
• Epistolary Novel, a type of story written as a series of letters sent by multiple characters to each other.
• Scrapbook Story, a story whose framing device takes the form of in-universe documents written by characters in the story, such as diary entries.

I'm not entirely sure if Epistolary Novel needs to be there since it involves letters, as opposed to how Apocalyptic Log and Scrapbook Story can use other types of writing.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 25th 2022 at 6:10:07 AM

How many are there "about literally diaries" examples that would fit into Secret Diary?

Again, the description we have on this site of Epistolary Novel is not really accurate, and the proper definition seen...everywhere else...does include diary-format stories. We need to clean up our description a bit, but that is the trope we're looking for here.

I definitely think that Secret Diary should be on the disambig at least. I believe one of the wicks I checked was actually a Secret Diary example listed under Diary.

I agree that Secret Diary should be on there. I would have put it in my previous post if I had known about that page.

And I'm fine with rewriting Epistolary Novel's description if it's inaccurate. A cursory glance of the Literature/ namespace shows that not every example involves letters; between the first two wicks in that namespace, one involves a blog, and another involves a diary. The description rewrite can be sandboxed if necessary.

Edit: I tagged Epistolary Novel just in case.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 25th 2022 at 7:09:53 AM

Disambig, hands down. Diaries exist, so we might as well talk about unusual diaries.