And How to Accomplish That
Have you ever read a book, or watched a movie, and noticed that you felt consistently off throughout the story? As if you couldn’t get your bearings, couldn’t find a way to predict what’s coming next, or found the character(s) to be delightfully unrelatable? And yet you truly enjoyed the experience. [It sounds like an oxymoron – I know – but stay with me.]
There’s a reason why what sense of imbalance is useful in some stories. That’s what we’re talking about today. Why and when you would want that sense of unease, and how to create it.
In the movie world, I can think of lots of examples of this. In parts of The Matrix and much of Memento, and Inception, viewers are thrown off-kilter. We aren’t sure what’s real and what isn’t. We aren’t even always sure where the character really is. (I’m talking about you Dominick Cobb.)
But this is just as prevalent in certain types of books. Let’s look at examples by category – depending on when and why you would want the reader to feel unsettled.
To Parallel Psychological Instability
First, when the main character’s psychological state is coming unhinged, it’s often most effective if the readers feel this as well. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is a great example of this. In the story, Eleanor Vance grows increasingly disoriented within the house – to such an extent that readers feel unstable and confused along with her. Jackson describes the house in such a way that the walls and doors seem to move.
The sense readers have parallels Eleanor’s mental instability. By making the story disorienting, readers have an opportunity to experience – to some extent – Eleanor’s inability to cope in the real world.
To Cause Readers to Consider a Controversial Theme
Second, when writers want readers to consider a theme that they might dismiss at first glance, one of the best ways to do so is to force the readers to step out of their element. By that I mean, cause them to feel disoriented so that they can’t predict what the character(s) will so. This end is often accomplished through the use of an unreliable narrator. We talked about this recently on the Gothic Literary Society YouTube channel, but I’ll summarize a couple of examples here.
The first is Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane. In the story, Teddy Daniels travels to an island to visit a prison for the criminally insane. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that Teddy’s perspective may not be accurate. This throws the reader off enough to make the theme – whether it’s better to live as a monster or to die as a good man – resonate. Years after reading the book and watching the movie, I still see that one, final scene in my mind. Whereas I might have disregarded it before, the nuances of both options are now forever warring in my mind.
The second is We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. [Jackson was a master of this concept of leaving readers unsettled.] She uses an unreliable narrator – Merricat Blackwood – in an entirely different way from Dennis Lehane. Rather than a tragic character, Merricat is deliriously odd. She’s vindictive, witchy and borderline autistic in such a delightful way that readers love her. And by using such an unrelatable character, readers are thrown off balance enough to consider something they might not have: that the collective is the enemy of the individual.
To Cause a Paradigm Shift
Third, humans have a habit of developing paradigms – for obvious and practical purposes. Paradigms help us to predict and respond to the world around us. But sometimes paradigms are false…or only partially true. And we writers love to call these into question.
William Gibson’s novel The Neuromancer – the inspiration for the movie The Matrix – does just that, among other things. By creating characters who can enter into the matrix and experience a separate, virtual reality, the book questions reality itself. It’s not simply that either the virtual reality or the seen one is true. The question is whether what we see and believe around us is actually the truth, or at least, the full-extent of the truth. Or whether, perhaps, we’ve been conditioned to believe things that aren’t true.
By using what was at that time, a cutting-edge idea of technology and the relationship between it and humans, Gibson created a world in which readers have no precedential leg to stand on. Rather, we’re left imbalanced and because of that, more open-minded to the theme.
How Do We Accomplish That
From the examples above, I think you can see the advantages to this sense of unease. And some examples of how writers have accomplished this. But how do we go about it?
As a writer, we only have twenty-six letters to work with. With these we craft people, settings, stories and sometimes entire worlds. The key to creating this sense of disorientation in readers is to use these very things in ways that they don’t expect, or with which they are unfamiliar. In all of these, what you want to create is a sense of the uncanny – when things that we expect to be familiar aren’t. They look like what we know, but then they function in ways that we don’t anticipate. I’ll give you examples of each.
People – As with Merricat and Teddy Daniels, unease blooms in the case of an unreliable narrator. To create one, your character must perceive reality in a false way. Sometimes the character is a liar, openly or secretly concocting a false reality – perhaps for reasons with which readers will sympathize… perhaps not.
Sometimes the character is mentally unstable, misunderstanding reality because of a psychological problem or a neurological impairment.
And sometimes the character is just so strange that his words and actions are consistently unexpected. If the reader can enjoy the character and yet can’t predict what he or she will do, that will create this sense of disorientation. Of course, the character’s actions need to make sense for him and for the plot. But they need to be unpredictable for the reader.
Setting – Some settings are guaranteed to throw readers out of their comfort zone. And I’m not necessarily referring to a fantasy setting. Most of these mirror reality enough that readers feel at home in the new world. If your characters live on Mars, but they have some means of growing food and keeping house and laboring, readers will feel at home even in the most distant galaxy. This is a wonderful feeling for other purposes, but not for what we’re describing.
If you want your readers to be disoriented, what you want in a setting – real-world or fantasy – is to create a sense of the outlandish. A pig farm on which the pigs rise up, attack the farmer, eat him and his wife and then go out into the world to accomplish whatever goal they have for themselves. I’m being a bit absurd to illustrate a point. Readers think that a pig farm will function in a given way. They know something about how it should work. So when it doesn’t work that way, it throws off the readers sense of balance.
Exactly what you want.
Plot – The same is true with respect to plots. The best way to create imbalance in the reader is to give them a plot that they think they recognize and then turn it upside down.
Say you picked up a murder mystery in which the body of a young girl is found at the beginning of the book. Her parents and the investigators team up to solve the crime. You settle in with the book, ready to read about the trail of the murderer and the clues that he/she has left.
But then the parents begin to act strangely. They don’t seem that sad. And their efforts to track the murderer, efforts that appeared normal at first, take an interesting turn. Now it doesn’t really seem like they’re actually looking for a killer. But we’re not sure what they’re looking for.
And the investigators too. What at first seems like a normal murder investigation becomes something else altogether. The people they’re questioning, the trails their pursuing become more and more [seemingly] disjointed. Why? Because we’re assuming one thing – that they’re looking for the murderer when in reality, they’re doing something else entirely.
That method – of twisting the expectations of the reader – is a wonderful way to create a sense of unease.
Conclusion
There are many reasons why we might want readers to feel unsettled. Sometimes it’s the best way to cause them to consider a theme that’s so far outside of their experience that they might overlook or disregard it at first glance.
To accomplish this, use the notion of the uncanny in your writing. Use characters, settings, or plots that seem to function in familiar ways and then twist them just enough to set everything on edge.
Not only will this help you shift the reader’s paradigm or open her up to your theme. It’ll also make your story that much more interesting and unique.
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