The Soul of the Full-Length Manuscript: Turning Life's Wounds into the Gift of Literary Fiction, Memoir, or Poetry

This book should come with a warning label: 'Be ready, you are going to have to go deeper than you ever imagined.' Dorothy Allison Author of Bastard Out of Carolina

Utilize your emotional, psychological, and spiritual self to produce the first draft of a full-length manuscript. This book helps you take the stuff that has been making a mess of your life and use it instead to make art, harmonized with craft. It acts as creative companion for individuals (those with or without writing experience) as they journey through the sharing of an impactful event in life, do exercises that help them transform internal obstacles into external gifts, and then write resolution and outcome. Lockhart's own rough drafts and excerpts from published fiction, memoir, and poetry of writers like Toi Derricotte, Helena Mar a Viramontes, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, along with films by writers and directors like Sherman Alexie offer kinship on the journey of unearthing and sharing a personal plot.

At times, you will feel that the book is designed to produce a new emotional, psychological, and spiritual you and that your resulting manuscript is merely the byproduct. Both are true of the design, because the purpose of art is to make yourself vulnerable about your experiences here in life--to have the courage to be vulnerable about those experiences so that you can connect with others who came here solo like you and will leave solo just like you.

And that process of sharing is transformative.