A diary is written for one reader. Publishing it hands it to strangers. That change of audience shifts what is fair — not because honesty is a problem, but because the people who appear in your pages never agreed to be in print. Most privacy trouble in published diaries is not caused by malice. It comes from a careless nickname left in chapter three, a letter quoted without thinking, or a relative who learns about their own divorce from a bookshop window. This checklist is designed to catch those things while they are still fixable.

Begin With an Audit of Living People

Before you worry about legal risk, do something simpler. Read the manuscript once, pen in hand, and mark every living person who appears. Not only the named ones. Also the “my sister’s husband”, the “consultant at the clinic”, the colleague whose job is recognisable to everyone in the office.

• Family, including those you assume will be fine about it.
• Friends and former friends, especially estranged ones.
• Colleagues, managers and employers, past and present.
• Professionals: doctors, therapists, solicitors, teachers, clergy.
• Strangers who were simply there — a waiter, a neighbour, a driver.

Beside each name, write down what the entry reveals. Anything touching health, sexuality, money, addiction, criminal allegations or someone’s competence at work deserves a second look. Those are the passages that cause the deepest hurt, and sometimes the ones that carry legal weight.

Anonymising Names Without Wrecking the Story

Changing “Rebecca” to “Rachel” is not anonymising. If you keep her age, her town, her job and the fact that she was the only woman in the department that year, you have simply renamed her. The detail identifies people, not the name.

Habits that genuinely help:

• Change names consistently. A character who is “M” on page 40 and “Margaret” on page 120 is a slip waiting to be noticed.
• Break the cluster. Move the event to another season, blur the job, drop the street name. One altered detail is rarely enough; three or four usually are.
• Vary your labels. Using “a friend” for five different people reads as evasion and protects nobody.
• Keep a private key. One page listing real names and their substitutes, stored away from the manuscript.
• Say so, briefly. A line in the preface — that some names and details have been changed — is honest and does not require apologising for the book.

Where the story depends entirely on a person being identifiable, ask yourself whether the story is worth that. Sometimes it is. Often it is not.

Consent Is a Conversation, Not a Formality

Asking permission by text the week before publication is not consent; it is notification. Do it earlier, and do it properly. Show the person the actual passage, not a summary of it. Give them time to think, and accept that they may come back with a no.

When they say yes, record what was agreed: which passage, which formats (print, ebook, audio), which territories, and whether they can withdraw before the book goes to press. A dated email is enough. Keep it with the permissions file.

People who cannot simply agree for themselves

Children appear in diaries constantly. Their parents can give permission, but the child will one day read the book as an adult, so write with that reader in mind. Where someone lacks capacity to consent — through dementia, illness or disability — talk to those who hold legal authority for them, and be prepared to leave the material out instead.

If a person refuses, the honest answer is usually to cut, rewrite or fictionalise beyond recognition. For anything contested, take advice from a solicitor experienced in media law before you sign a contract.

Copyright: Whose Words Are These?

Your diary entries are your copyright. Other people’s words are not. Letters, emails, text messages, photographs and poems sent to you remain the property of whoever wrote or took them, and publishing them in full is normally a permission job. Short quotations used for comment or criticism may be a different matter, but do not assume the exception covers you.

Song lyrics and poems are almost always licensed, and even a few lines can be expensive. Photographs taken by someone else need the photographer’s permission, and if people are recognisable in them, their own consent as well.

If you are publishing the diary of someone who has died, the rights usually sit with their estate. Speak to the executor before you do anything else. And read your own publishing contract carefully: what rights are you granting, for how long, in which formats, and can you reuse your own entries elsewhere later?

The Edges of Law: Defamation, Privacy and Personal Data

A diary entry presented as fact can defame someone if it would lower their reputation and you cannot defend it — for example as true, or as honest opinion, or as publication in the public interest. Presenting an allegation as your own belief is not automatically a defence.

Separately, publishing private information about identifiable people engages their right to a private life, which has to be balanced against your right to free expression. Data protection law adds another layer: health, sexual life, religion and criminal allegations count as special category data, and the literary and journalistic exemptions are narrower than many writers assume.

This is general guidance only. Where the material is sensitive, contested or likely to upset someone who could afford to complain, get proper legal advice before publication rather than after. It is far cheaper to change a paragraph than to pulp a print run.

The Dead, and Other People’s Secrets

The dead cannot generally be defamed, but their families can be wounded, and confidences often outlive the person who kept them. Medical detail is a particular trap: describing an illness, a hospital and a year can identify a patient even when the name is gone.

Before you publish, ask the blunt question. Is this my secret to tell? If the answer is no, or even “probably”, that is your answer.

The Final Read-Through Before You Publish

1. Read the whole manuscript once for privacy alone. No line-editing, no tidying. Just look at people.
2. Check that every name change has held from first page to last, including in notes, captions and the index.
3. Confirm every quotation, letter, photograph and lyric has a documented permission behind it.
4. Arrange a legal read if the material is sensitive or anyone has objected.
5. Keep the key, the permissions file and any consent emails with the final manuscript, stored securely.
6. Telephone the people who matter most before publication day. A warning call is worth more than a considerate footnote.

None of this has to blunt the book. Diaries are powerful precisely because they are unguarded, and the entries that survive a careful reading are usually the ones that were defensible all along. Protect the people in your pages, and you protect the book as well.

Photo: qiye / Pixabay