1. Write Your Story Statement
Writes essays to reconcile his past traumas.
2. in 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, and the ways they react to the world about them.
Personal weakness betrays Darius’s true intentions at keeping relationships. Compound that with a negligent mother, a conniving half-brother, and the lies and deceits of friends both old and new and what you get is a clusterfuck of people screwing Darius out of the fulfillment that loving relationships bring.
Sometimes the lies he’s told have backfired, stymying his trail. Sometimes his sincerity has provoked ridicule. Either way, the forces against him hinder even his best laid plans, sending him into his psychiatrist’s office, into sullen seclusion, and ultimately on a quest for redemption and reconciliation through the narratives he writes in his personal essays. Will his reflections help him overcome his personal traumas, Or will they only plunge him deeper into despair and isolation?
3. Break Out Title
Confession Is Not Betrayal
It’s My mouth
Trauma Mia: The Stories Of How I Learned To Accept Vulnerability As My Superpower.
4. Develop two smart comparables for your novel. This is a good opportunity to immerse yourself in your chosen genre. Who compares to you? And why?
Real Life by Brandon Taylor. We share similar emotional content, and characterization. He’s black and from the Midwest, I’m black and from the Midwest, He’s a college student, I’m an MFA student. We both share messy relationships and try to reconcile them with what we respectively desire to achieve in them.
She Memes Well: Essays by Quinta Brunson. Hers is childhood dreams, mine is childhood nightmares—foils of the same time but with very different connections.
5. write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound following the format above. Though you may not have one now, keep in mind this is a great developmental tool. In other words, you best begin focusing on this if you're serious about commercial publication.
Confession Is Not Betrayal is an account by Darius Chitison, a 40-something writer, a man of unique life experience, a man saddled by unanswered questions, struggling to live in the fallout of his previous wounds. He’s lost friends and gained new ones. He’s lived a life full of love and laughter, heartache and harrow. And through a series of true stories, he attempts to reconcile the charms and traumas of his past.
6. sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Why will they feel in turmoil? Conflicted? Anxious? Sketch out one hypothetical scenario in the story wherein this would be the case--consider the trigger and the reaction.
The turmoil in Confession Is Not Betrayal comes from the disparity between the relationships he has and the ones he’d like to have. The ones he has are fraught with deceit and neglect and confrontation. It’s a confusing set of circumstances that sees him cling to the ideal of the past while viewing it through the cynicism of his present. It’s a detached searching, a casual stroll through the traumas of the disappointing people who’ve set him up and let him down.
7. sketch out your setting in detail. What makes it interesting enough, scene by scene, to allow for uniqueness and cinema in your narrative and story? Please don't simply repeat what you already have which may well be too quiet. You can change it. That's why you're here! Start now. Imagination is your best friend, and be aggressive with it.
The settings range as the essays do. From family reunions to elementary school classrooms to a convention center to a college lecture theater—the settings process through a series of real life locations and offer a back drop for the action to unfold. They aren’t so grand as to be characters themselves. No New York in Sex and the City. More a canvas, blank as a cloudless sky, where emotional turmoil is stained through reflection.