Can a scene be written to be disorienting and not be too confusing to readers?
I've written a scene in a short story where the character and her party are suddenly attacked in the night. It's written in first-person and the character had just been shaken awake from a nightmare; so I had purposefully written it to be disorienting. One of my beta readers and my editor have commented on how it reads confusing and seems like some details have been missed in my excitement. At first, I was very excited to hear this from them, because that's exactly how I had wanted the scene to feel. But I started to wonder if, perhaps it was too much and hard to follow.
I would think that some details would be missed and even with some combat training, the character would have been out of it having just been woken up suddenly.
So I guess I wondering how a scene can be written from a disoriented character's perspective, and not alienate readers?
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A disoriented character does not have a perspective. A perspective is what you have when the world makes sense to you. When you are disoriented, you don't have a perspective. You have a whirl of sensations the refuse to resolve into a perspective.
I seem to remember that it was Dr. Johnson who said something to the effect that you cannot reproduce the effect of being dullness and garrulity without being dull and garrulous. The same seems to apply here: you cannot reproduce the effect of disorientation without being disorienting.
But I don't think there is any good story reason to try to reproduce the sensation of disorientation. It is a mere physical symptom. It may be a plot point, but reproducing the sensation is never essential to the plot, or to the reader's attachment to the character's story. It is always the character's moral arc, the decisions they have to make, what they want and what they are willing to do to get it, that are the crux of the story.
After all, the enjoyment of adventure without its physical discomforts is much of the pleasure of literature. The reader who reads about a character being hit on the head does not want to actually experience their headache. At most they want to sympathize with their headache.
So it should be enough to tell your reader that the character is disoriented, without trying to reproduce that disorientation.
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I personally think you shouldn't shy from conveying the experience of the disorientation as long as the narrator clearly conveys their confusion so we get into their experience of it, rather than our own.
I spun, then was face down on the floor, without even the memory
of falling. Or had I never gotten up? I couldn't make any sense of
it. Had I been found by the werewolves?"
Because the experience is filtered through the narrator's expressed confusion, we don't care if it doesn't make any sense because we have faith that we'll understand when the narrator does.
Furthermore, I must disagree with the statement that "You cannot reproduce the effect of dullness and garrulity without being dull and garrulous."
Consider the following example:
Frank's life was deeply, unremittingly ordered. The sameness of every day
leached the colors from his world until he found himself fantasizing about
horrible, terrible things happening to him. The promise of seeing the
vivid red of his own blood, the exquisite pain of a shattered hand or foot
called to him to break the gray sameness of his life.
But still he did nothing.
Until the morning when he woke up with the sure knowledge that he had to
die if he wanted to truly live.
Do we not feel Frank's boredom and desperation without being bored or feeling our own desperation while reading it?
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This seems like a great idea, and possibly the best way to approach this would be to have the time of disorientation be relatively brief.
I've not written dream sequences ever, so I don't have any suggestions beyond making it obvious that it's a dream sequence. Possibly making what is occurring straightforward for the reader, but with signals that it isn't real. Then as the protagonist begins to wake up, the dream starts to morph into what is happening in reality, and both the character and the reader still believe they are asleep.
Follow this up with something that jolts the character awake, and they will be disoriented as they will realize this isn't part of the dream, and be unsure as to how much of what they had just experienced was real and how much wasn't.
However, the way to clarify what is going on would be the natural reaction of the protagonist anyway, which is trying to find out what is happening.
The character would not stay in a disoriented state. Particularly if battle-trained, they would first attempt to assess the situation, then try to find out as much information as possible to understand the danger they face, and how they can try to combat it.
The vividness and horror of the nightmare might keep popping back into their head and causing them to be confused (for example if the nightmare involved being chased by werewolves, they might think they are currently being attacked by werewolves in reality, even if they don't exist), which would add to continuing the confusion of earlier, whilst keeping the true "what the hell is going on?" thoughts of the reader to a minimum.
Then the protagonist and reader can be brought up to speed, either by Basil Exposition or their own assessment of the situation. This way no important information is lost, but you still get the feeling of skewed perception for a brief period.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/23777. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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