Sunday, December 4, 2016

And then she woke up. (The End).

How do you place altered states of consciousness in your stories?

This is a very interesting question to me. Without giving too much away, altered states of consciousness and/or reality are the hinge on
which several of my stories turn. This is because I'm writing from my continuum of understanding about how the layers of the universe (and everything in it) mesh together. In this, my own body of experience is remarkably similar to the stories and traditions of a number of cultures, and yet these elements of human experience are largely unexplored in fiction, or appear only as the shallowest of tropes. So, that's my starting point. But then it gets hard.

Altered consciousness and alternate reality states typically involve a sort of raw, immediate 'understanding', like an embedded sensory intelligence that bypasses verbal or logical processes. But the very act of writing requires both language and temporal sequencing. It's also difficult to pinpoint what the dreamscapes of other people resemble. For a time, I ran a meditation and visualisation group for women, and I was always amazed at the differences in their descriptions of their inner meditative space: colours, lights, sounds, voices, scenes, emotions, even sensations of movement. Conveying the wordlessness of these sorts of processes in words is difficult. Conveying it in a way that supports your story or drives your plot forwards is even harder.

And then there are the dream critics. I've been told by writing teachers to never use dreams or dream sequences. Never. It’s sloppy, overdone. Lewis Carroll has already beaten you to it, with the same ending as every second grader who ever wrote a story: (Spoiler Alert!) “So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.” Also, dreams don’t make sense (allegedly) and are boring (allegedly).

Clearly, some people don’t have the kind of dreams I have.

Even so, I agree that using dreams in stories is usually a bad idea, especially when they are a lazy fix for plot or structure problems or a clumsy vehicle for flashback. (Pro tip: even if you are a prodigiously talented dreamer, don’t talk about your dreams too much or people will think you're crazy). But if your character is an oracle, if they enter a shaman-like trance to pass into another dimension, if they confront the scenery of their own death in the underworld, if they feel the cold burn of premonition on a warm day, then it’s important and it needs to be in your story.

And if they’re your point of view character, then it needs to be through the lens of their altered state as it happens.

Funnily enough, film and television have no hang-ups over shifts in consciousness. It’s easy to warp a scene using filters, lighting, focus, sound, timing edits and camera movement to portray a perceptual shift. But in writing there’s only a line of words that must obey the same rules as all the other words but take the reader’s perception to a different – and still comprehensible – place.

I’m still learning to craft my own writing to do this well. But there are some principles that – instinctively – I know will help. First of all, steer clear of the floaty-woaty, dreamy-weamy vibe. Invariably, 'dream-like' means lots of vague, open ended pseudo-description, which slows the writing, and bores the reader. My experience tells me that haziness demarcates the boundary-states, and after that comes a point of crystalline focus. So my job is to get the character (and the reader) through the haze as quickly as possible and into the new mise-en-scène

Next, convey the difference of that state without confusing the reader, even if it confuses the character. This is best done (I suspect) by shrinking your writing, not expanding it, using carefully chosen sensory details. Keep the sentences short to avoid accidental floatiness. And despite what some writers’ groups say, absolutely do not provide an explainer. Let your story flow. It will soon be clear that the new place operates under its own rules, and you have the rest of the story to show what they are. 

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