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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/23774
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/23774
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 1