Mental Purgatory

Okay, so this general idea is done all the time unfortunately. Heck, the Diary of Anne Frank was hugely successful and it used this concept. Likewise, Perks of Being a Wallflower, a book I often promote on here, uses a concept similar to this. However, the reason for the many books that use the journal structure is that it works. You tell a story straight from the emotions and feelings of your narrator. Nothing is hidden from you and you’re allowed to see exactly what the narrator is thinking and feeling. At the same time, you’re allowed to include subtle revelations of things that maybe the narrator doesn’t really know about themselves, or that the reader has yet to figure out.

The method in which I thought of conveying this story was through a running journal. A track athlete documents their work outs each day, marking how much they’ve ran, how they felt during the work out. But in addition to the physical details, the runner will include all of their emotional details… what they thought about on the run, why they thought about it, etc.

Utilizing this set-up would allow me to go deeper into the narrator’s psyche than a normal journal would. Why you ask? Well, you write in a journal when you want to confide in it. As such, it means that you can’t really highlight certain moods as easily in this respect. The narrator talks when the narrator wants to talk. However, by utilizing something that the narrator sees as an obligation, you can see periods of days where he simply reports how the exercise was, and other days where he writes lengthy thoughts. It will almost come across as if the narrator’s reluctant at times to share his thoughts with the journal.