How to write madness

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Necronic

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I've started working on a pretty ambitious writing project recently that involves writing about madness. Not just "oh snap he's crazy and he poops himself", but more about a place where reality itself has grown thin and corrupted.

A lot of my inspiration for this is coming from a series called Viriconium, and a little bit from the The Steel Remains/Cold Commands descriptions of "The Gray Places".

So, I have a couple of examples, but I can't really place my finger on what it is with the writing that makes it work. If you guys have any other examples of writing about madness, or about places where reality has weakened (I don't even know how to describe it other than that) I would appreciate it. Or just any advice about how you describe something that can't be described, such as the thinning of reality, but in such a way that it can't be appreciated by the characters in the context.
 
Establish your rules for this. Even if the characters/reader never know them, it's easier to know exactly what would happen in what circumstances so it feels correct for you when events play out. You don't want it to feel like the reality of your writing it is crumbling.
 
I'd read some case studies relating the events of actual patients that are exhibiting the symptoms that you would be writing about.
 
When I took my CIT course, to help me deal with "consumers" on the streets, we were shown a clip that depicted the reality of a schizophrenic. You would be watching, hearing a muffled voice talking in your ear, and then, as you looked around, the wall would just be yawning and cavernous, leading into a dark nothing.

When reality breaks down, all one can simply do is paint the picture as it's seen - there are no words to describe it, as language is insufficient to delineate what our minds comprehend. There is no structure to unreality, despite our minds' best efforts to correct this. That is what results in madness - our minds are unable to codify and interpret their surroundings, unable to frame them within what we know to be true. So they shatter.
 
any advice about how you describe something that can't be described, such as the thinning of reality, but in such a way that it can't be appreciated by the characters in the context.
The easy way out is to have a trusted third party. A therapist, a narrator, or even a historian trying to piece the puzzle together after the fact can bridge the reader and the experiences the characters are going through.

Beyond that you're simply talking about writing a book with an unreliable narrator, and there are many examples of that.

Maybe you should shuffle all your current thoughts away and approach the problem from a different perspective. Rather than focusing on "describe a place where reality is thin" focus on some other aspect or intended impact of the story.

Why do you want to explore such a place? Are you trying to induce a particular feeling or mode in the audience?

Why would such a place be important? Is it a place people want to get to or get out of? Is it important that the people inside it eventually become aware of it, or is this a "ignorance is bliss" situation for some characters?

Are there particular characters with traits that would flourish, or die, in such a place? Is it merely a strange racquetball court where you want to see how, exactly, the characters bounce around inside it?

Is there a barrier, or tunnel, or method to get from "reality" to this space and is that transition important? Or is it an imagined place, or a place that doesn't exist on the same plane, or is it the same place, but merely acting or reacting differently for each character?

Is the place itself a character? Do any of the characters experience a significant change?

Can such a place provide the characters with their desires and hopes, or alternately provide a waking stage for their nightmares to show up?

While stories about places can be interesting it's ultimately the characters that become compelling for the audience. When in doubt, focus on the characters.
 

Necronic

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The easy way out is to have a trusted third party. A therapist, a narrator, or even a historian trying to piece the puzzle together after the fact can bridge the reader and the experiences the characters are going through.
It won't work in this case since it's universal, and in other cases it's a bit of a cheap trick since it's a way to weasel out of difficult (but far more rewarding) in-context exposition. Here the world itself, existence itself, is undergoing an existential crisis. I've seen other people write this (see: Viriconium), but I can't figure out how it's done. This perhaps may be too ambitious ultimately since the only place I've really seen it done will is Viriconium and Neil Gaiman once referred to it's author as "intimidating".

As for the other stuff, all of that is part of the plot (more or less). I've got pretty much all of it sorted out. But I appreciate the response.
 
yeah, Harrison is, at minimum, intimidating in terms of writing.

Ok, so you've got two extremes in story telling.

One, you exist in reality, nothing is different, and people largely accept what you're saying at face value and apply their own understanding of reality to it in order to fill in the blanks.

Two, your story exists in fantasy. One or more things are significantly different from reality, and your job as author is to introduce the differences in a way that it's clear to the reader that this is fantastic. It's not reality, and here's exactly where their normal model baks down so they feel comfortable and not lost.

I think I'd really need to understand better where the book falls on that scale, and if it shifts along that scale, how and when it does so.

It sounds like you want to try writing a fantasy book (ie, it cannot, or at least has not, yet occurred in our reality, and thus people have no basis to understand your book without deliberate cue son your part) but you don't want to provide typical cues?

Alternately, I'm way off base and what you're really trying to get at is the same thing as trying to describe the fourth dimension to three dimensional characters.

Can you plot a generic timeline here? Do the characters start out normal, in a normal world and things change? Or are things fundamentally different than the real world, and only the characters understanding changes over the length of the book?

I think you'll still have to invoke your readers suspended disbelief at some point in the story. At what point in the story should your readers understand that things are not as they seem, or that the characters, narrators, or events aren't being reliably interpretted?
 

Necronic

Staff member
Two, your story exists in fantasy. One or more things are significantly different from reality, and your job as author is to introduce the differences in a way that it's clear to the reader that this is fantastic. It's not reality, and here's exactly where their normal model baks down so they feel comfortable and not lost.
This is actually incredibly helpful. I do want the reader to feel lost and uncomfortable.

Can you plot a generic timeline here? Do the characters start out normal, in a normal world and things change? Or are things fundamentally different than the real world, and only the characters understanding changes over the length of the book?
The characters start out in a normal world and things change.

In this world people have started a new type of dreaming that is more concious than normal (as a form of entertainment), which slowly causes madness, and this process begins to damage reality as it turns out that reality is affected by perception. There will be people who have never experienced it, but it's an infection of sorts and you only have to do it once to damage yourself, and possibly I will allow for it to be contagious to people who have never used it.

The whole thing is about weakening our reality as a means for demons, or interdimensional aliens (both really) to enter our world. It's basically their version of terraforming.
 
You may want to look at Promethea by Alan Moore; there's a world above ours that combines dreams, afterlife, other dimensions, etc. and the coming of it is considered the end of the world. Part of the series has two main characters exploring tructure given to it that makes up what reality is.
 

Necronic

Staff member
Man, something is up with the alert system. For some reason I didn't think anyone had responded other than Steinman, but there are all these other responses. Apparently even talking about this subject will make you mad.

Also googling "writings of a mad man" will only get you a bunch of Mad Men blogs.
 
So it's a bit more like Videodrome, or Total Recall (or more properly "We can remember it for you wholesale")?

--Patrick
 

Necronic

Staff member
Videodrome is an excellent reference for this.

Also I picked up Promethea today and started reading it. I dunno if it's just me but I think that Alan Moore may be a bit over-rated. Maybe it's just that he comes across as such a blowhard asshole at times, particularly about the adaptations to his work that are sometimes, in my opinion, better than the original (V for Vendetta) although they are often pretty bad. Although for the ones that were bad (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Watchmen), I can't say that the originals weren't exactly fantastic. So far I'm not impressed too much with Promethea, but I'll continue reading it. I also picked up Sandman. Sandman is amazing.
 
This is just my own opinion, but madness is sort of like bad guys: the best ones are the ones that think they're right. In other words, it's not so much that they're nuts because they see things in a way that we don't, it's because we're nuts because we don't see it like them.
 
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