Let's start

[erimia]

I never could force myself to keep a stable diary. Perhaps I don't have much a need to share my thoughts with others, or perhaps I constrained myself too much with believing in that "if you can't say something interesting, don't say anything". So I ended up leaving behind several diaries and blogs, on paper and digital, always with not much content. It didn't bother me much, but recently I've found myself sharing quite a lot of my everyday life details on Discord servers and in conversations with other people in the Internet, going as far as almost using those forums as blogging platforms that I update when something interesting happens, and then I noticed that I like expressing myself this way and thought: why bother people when I have an empty personal blog? Besides, I've seen the post on Tumblr encouraging people to write about what's going on now, because we are living in the historical moment that will be studied a lot in the future (hopefully not by aliens exploring the dead civilization), so it gave me some additional motivation. Perhaps this blog will be active, with musings, reviews, memories and so on. Perhaps it won't be. Time will tell.

Comments

[igenlode]

I think a lot of my 'diaries' have existed in the form of letters to other people (my mother saved the entire archive of letters I wrote back from university, for instance).

I've noticed that I tend to blog much more when I don't have any other ongoing written output -- fandom discussions in email, for example.

[erimia]

I think that the feeling of responsibility to respond and to make the letters/messages engaging and interesting encourages me to be productive there, while writing a diary doesn't have this motivation and so ends up mostly lackluster. Besides, writing to others usually somewhat narrows down the number of subjects to write about, eliminating the "where to begin" anxiety.

I really love fandom discussions, and hope that there will be some fandom-related things in my blog, if it doesn't die down. Unfortunately, I'm not a creator of any kind, which instantly limits my ability to contribute to fandoms, and also I don't understand psychology that well, so it's unlikely that I'll produce long texts of character analysis. My involvemt in fandoms is always quite passive. Maybe I'll try writing some reviews or making translations, though probably not now.

[igenlode]

Hence the "Dear Diary" approach, I assume, to give the writer a target to address...
It's never really been a problem for me; I make anecdotes of everything in my head all the time, and some of them get written down to one destination or another.

My gut feeling is that psychology and character analysis are not really related, and that in fact psychology, like the dreaded literary analysis, is probably not a good tool for approaching fiction. (My impression is that it involves having preconceived categories and trying to fit a given story into the desired tick-boxes.)
Character analysis in my view is more about being able to see things as they appear to the character -- being able to put yourself in the other man's shoes and understand his world according to his bias and limited knowledge. It's more a matter of story-telling than diagnosis; as Dorothy L. Sayers said of religion, if something works as a coherent, self-consistent story, if it is good and true as a piece of art, then the dogma will pretty much look after itself.
If you can tell the story from the character's point of view in a way that makes sense of his actions, then he's probably a rounded and convincing character (rather than a cardboard cut-out who acts for the convenience of the plot).