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Q&A 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 nightmar...

3 answers  ·  posted 8y ago by Trynda E. Adair‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T05:24:52Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/23773
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Trynda E. Adair‭ · 2019-12-08T05:24:52Z (almost 5 years ago)
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?

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2016-07-12T03:17:32Z (over 8 years ago)
Original score: 7