The Complete Diary of a Detectress + extra ‘behind the scenes’ insight

Here you can find all episodes in one place, plus insight into how I came to start the Diary of a Detectress series and what I learned through writing it.

In case you missed the series, and are wondering what I'm talking about, here’s a little snippet of it:

Dear Diary,

My last foster mother was a rather indifferent parent, but one of the few nice things she did for me was to give me this leather-bound journal before I left her house forever. When she presented it to me, she said (apparently not realising the ubiquitous, all-purpose nature of laptops these days) that I could use it to write down the things that I learned at university. Well I have to admit that it’s taken me nearly a whole semester to make use of it. Not because I didn’t learn anything, but rather, because, well… laptops.

Now I finally have the golden opportunity to use this beautiful book for the purpose it was intended, and here is what I have learned:

1. Laptops don’t work with a flat battery.
2. Starbucks don't let you use their power outlets after closing time.
3. Even a medium-sized student dorm room can be cleared of a semester’s worth of junk within an hour when you have three burly security guards helping you.
4. Pavements are cold.

So far I’m quite proud of myself for not having freaked out.

Not even a tiny bit.

Ok, I can feel it coming on…

Read more from episode 1

All episodes

(My suggestion is to right-click and open them in new tabs so you don’t lose this page)

Episode 1 Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 Episode 5 Episode 6 Episode 7 Episode 8 Episode 9 Episode 10 Episode 11 Episode 12 Episode 13 Episode 14 Episode 15 Final Episode

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Behind the scenes. How I came to write the Diary of a Detectress series, and what I learned about writing through doing so:

Imagine the scene:
You’ve just discovered Steemit.
It seems to be important to have a niche and to post regularly.
Therefore you have to come up with a concept or brand idea.

What do you choose?

At the time, I was super excited about this new platform where all these people were posting and commenting and making money while doing it.

But there was just one problem. If I joined, what would my niche be?

“Well,” said my inner voice “...there’s always fiction.” I like writing stories. But although posting fiction would work, I didn’t have that many finished stories that I was free to post. And anyway a lot of other people had already had that idea.

Then it struck me. A blog is almost like a public diary, right? What would happen if that diary was a fictional one? I could write about all kinds of exciting and unlikely events that would happen to my fictional character. She could go anywhere and do anything! It seemed like the possibilities were endless…

Dear difficult diary

However, as often happens, it didn’t work out exactly as I’d thought. Firstly, the only point behind writing a fictional diary is to make it more exciting than real life, which meant I had to come up with some sort of mystery or twist right at the start.

That led to a chain of events that were hard to control and which had to be followed to their natural conclusion. Sophie couldn’t very well just drop everything and go swanning off abroad without first solving the mystery of why she was expelled. And then there was Adam, and the question of her parents' deaths to think about...

Although it was fictional, it also had to be believable. I mean yes, I could have dropped a deus ex machina into every episode, but that would have got old very fast. It’s true what they say about writing, that once you’ve started the characters along a path, it’s hard to control what they do.

Then there’s the fact that it’s kind of hard to write in a daily diary format and make it really interesting. The narratives that we find in books, films and series tend to skip over a lot of everyday activities (showering, eating, housework etc) because they’re super boring to read about and aren’t necessary for the plot.

I’m a busy person and didn’t have the time to write every single day. Therefore, it became apparent to me that I had to be more flexible about the time period that the each episode would cover.

So I learned a lot about what might be feasible when writing a series. Another thing I learned was to do with my own writing style.

I’m not a pantser

Anyone familiar with modern fiction writing terminology may have heard of outliners and pantsers.

Outliners are people who plan the story first by writing an outline before attempting to start writing. Pantsers are…. well they’re the people who don’t. They fly by the seat of their pants, diving into the story without any idea where it’s leading or how it's going to end.

Some very famous writers are pantsers. I’ve heard that Stephen King and Margaret Atwood (author of The Handmaid’s Tale) write that way...

..and all I can say is: Very well done to them!

I started this series as a pantser, but was very soon bogged down in a terrifying mire of “where is this GOING??”, and was forced to make an outline. So there we have it. Turns out I’m an outliner. Or a Plotter, as we're also called. But that’s ok, because so it JK Rowling.

It was sort of exhilarating to try doing it the other way, but also ultimately paralyzing. I felt that I couldn’t progress until I had an outline. Until then, I was worrying over the fact that I might be painting my characters into a corner that they’d never (believably) escape from.

In this case, it all turned out alright in the end because of an idea that I had at the gym for how to continue and resolve the story( bless that treadmill), but in the future you can bet your life that I’ll be going back to my trusty outlining method.

So having finished the series, I’m now considering compiling it into an e-book. Anyone got an opinion on that? Please let me know in the comments.

Also, I’ve already started writing the next series, so watch my page for the first new episode.

You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter or join the elusive mailing list.

Until next time!
Victoria x

All images used in this post are my own