Alternating between reality and fantasy

I haven't written anything quite like it, but I think I'd have trouble going back-and-forth, too.

Perhaps that's the source of your difficulty. I get that she's going mad--but why is she experiencing lucid periods, too? I'm not a mental health professional, but my impression is that a break with reality, untreated and with the stress that caused the break still in place, stays broken.

If I were to tackle it, I think I'd begin with short--one paragraph--hallucinatory episodes (which the character would recognize as such) that become longer as the sane portions become shorter, over a fairly brief page span such as a chapter. After that, I'd stick with all hallucinatory.

Is that approach a possibility?

Maryn, thinking this novel sounds like something she'd like to read

Is it jumping back and forth because the POV is changing? Are we seeing it through her eyes and then through the narrator's?

I had a situation in my novel that is similar, but not quite the same.

For the length of a chapter, I alternated between one character who was caught inside of a psychic dream, and another character who was awake and trying to get her out of that dream. Each change was a scene break.

I wrote the dream in third person-present tense and italicized it (anything said or done using their psychic powers was written this way). Reality was written third person limited, past tense, just like the rest of the novel. Each section was as long as needed to convey the necessary information, from a few lines to a few pages.

You may not need to set your characters delusions aside in such an obvious way (tense change, italics). It all depends on how you write it. If you are using a limited POV, it can be very obvious to the reader, simply by language choice. Shorter sentences, instances of paranoia. You said this is near the end of the novel, so the reader has a good idea of this person's voice. Changing that dramatically will clue us in that something has changed in her.

From the way you described it I'm guessing that another character is narrating the side of the people breaking in to rescue her. His or her POV is going to be very different at this point from your heroine.

Make sure you know what information needs to be conveyed by this section of the narrative, and that the information is given. Is it even necessary to switch back and forth between the two? Could the story benefit from the entire section being told by one point of view, rather than two? It may be an exercise worth trying, if only to figure out what the scene really needs.

What's the POV? If it's first-person, from the woman's view, or even third-person limited from her view, she won't recognize the madness. It will all seem real, and even logical. Your job then will be to describe illogical, irrational, hallucinatory things in a logical, rational, realistic manner. Some good classic short stories/novellas that do something similar to this come to mind:

Silent Snow, Secret Snow, by Conrad Aiken
The Black Monk, by Anton Chekhov
The Horla, by Guy de Maupassant
The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl, by Ray Bradbury

Might be worth your time to study these a little.

caw.

Hi Celia,

Sounds like a cool and interesting ending. I think what you're after is a third-person unreliable narrator. I've only played with the idea, but the narration is all "sane" though it's through the eyes of a MC who's going insane. When you say you're writing in "third person unlimited," this may be where the problem lies?

I haven't tried alternating back and forth, but I've a story called THE PRISONER on my Web site that may be of interest:

http://www.citlink.net/~goldschd/g-revisions/samples.html
http://www.citlink.net/~goldschd/g-revisions/docs/goldschmidt-the-prisoner.pdf

Like I said, I didn't go back and forth -- instead, the MC leaves the scene altogether at the end. And the others sort out the mess. Maybe you can keep your MC's insane thoughts/actions and intersperse them with a secondary character who "sees" the sane real world? So each paragraph is clearly from either your MC's perspective or from the secondary character's perspective?

Not sure if this helps....

DaveG

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a good short story read with something like this. It's in first person though, so I guess it was easier.

http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html

Very tricky but very interesting if you can pull it off. But I'm going to toss some things out there.

The first thing to check on is did you establish how her madness reads earlier on in the novel? Did she have hallucinations earlier on? If not then maybe that's why it's not clear because it came out of nowhere. If the hallucinations were established earlier, write them that same way but make them clean.

One thing that I'd try to clean things up is write out what her hallucination is from beginning to end without any cuts of reality. Then write the other character's POV in reality. From those two, you may be able to find some kind of natural breaks to blend the two together in the "back-and-forth" style you want into something seamless.

But, of course, these are just ideas I'd use. I don't know how helpful they might be. I'd be interested to know how it turns out. Good luck!

Tienci said:

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a good short story read with something like this. It's in first person though, so I guess it was easier.

http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html

Click to expand...

Glad you mentioned this one. Should have made my list, too.

caw.

No need to be the third person to mention "The Yellow Wallpaper," but I'll be the first to mention "The Telltale Heart" (Poe). There's also "The Tooth" (Shirley Jackson). But all these stay within one POV.

People in a psychotic state may know they're psychotic. They may have periods when their perceptions are normal. They aren't psychotic about everything, either. The man on the bus who talks to an unseen companion knew where to wait for the bus and how to pay his fare. The woman who thinks she was commanded to kill her children finds a knife the same way she'd find one if she wanted to slice zucchini.

If your character is going mad because she's been alone too long, she'll likely hallucinate other people or sentient entities to keep her company. Did you see Castaway? This could begin mildly. First she notices that the floor lamp looks a bit like a human figure. Then she anthropomorphizes it more and more until, by the end, it's a goddess or a deceased friend, with a name, who converses with her. The accidental facelike contours in a rough plaster wall can become characters.

The woman is in a room, and the rescuers are outside the house. Wouldn't the settings differentiate the two POVs enough?

Hi, Celia

Here's a suggestion you can try. If nothing else, it will be a good exercise in writing. Break your scene into a number of sensory cues to which your character and her imagining mind will react. Next, treat them each individually, in logical sequence, with the real person's reaction first, and the imagining mind questioning the real person's interpretation. Start with a dominance of the real person, with the imagining mind's initial reactions mere questioning of the real interpretation, but as you go on, slowly tip the balance so at the end, the real person's reactions are short and tight, while the imagining mind's reactions are lucid and outrageous. This would be like a mental battle, with a shift in the balance of power, which should show (or represent) the person's emerging madness. And, you'll have an opportunity to use all of the senses, as well as possibly pulling in experiences from earlier parts of the story. Also, the more unhinged the imagining mind gets, the more impatient/angry/upset you can make the responses of the real person.

The imagining mind can be written in italics, like internal dialogue, so you don't have to pull fancy tricks with tense or person.

You can work in the other character's actions/observations, but I tried that in one of my stories, and an editor friend nixed it as way too distracting (the multiple scene breaks with changes in POV character). You can also have the "outside character" be the source of the sensory cues without getting inside his head, yet his described actions can lend interpretation of his thought processes to the reader. So, the real person may recognize that the "other character" is outside, but the imagining mind refuses to believe it.

Sounds like a great, fun scene to write.

Or you can take a cue from Edgar Allan Poe...Maddening!

Read Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. Brilliant work!


Beth

What about instead of changing back and forth between reality and fantasy, just mix them up! For example:

Three huge lizards, standing up on their hind legs, ran into the room. 'Thank god! She's alive!' one of them hissed.
'Get away from me, you monsters!' she cried, and scampered into the furthest corner.
'She's suffering from delusions' another one said, this one was wearing a turban.
'Well, she's been through quite an ordeal', hissed the first lizard.

Ok, so it's a bit quick and basic. But what I mean is, make what she's seeing obviously a hallucination, but what she hears is the real thing.

I think I'm a little confused about whether your character is insane all the time or going in and out of sanity. I think everyone here has great ideas for showing her insanity and mixing it with reality. Something that I pictured also was maybe what NeuroFizz mentioned: sensory cues. You could have her imagining somethiing and then hear a bang which she incorporates into her fantasy. You could then switch to her rescuers as they're banging against the front door. Like the lizard thing, she could imagine things talking to her, but then you'd switch back to the rescuers and show that they were the ones who had said it and are now worried she's not responding. I can totally picture this in a movie, but I can see that writing it is tougher! Sounds fun, though, and very interesting to read!!