I have a WIP in which some strange force is altering people’s memories and perception of reality (something like the Mandela Effect or the inception movie but with memories) How can I explore better this idea? Also, I want this story to be dark, graphic and disturbing, but I don’t know how should I do it. Throughout the plot, the characters points of view will slowly contradict each other more as their perception of time, past and reality gets more altered and messed up (to the point where it looks like they’re living in different universes, and they can’t differentiate present from the past, or reality from thoughts. they even can’t be sure of each other’s existence anymore). But how can I write good dark and unsettling scenes from this premise?
Hello @Rosana Nas Alturas ! I see you are new here. Hopefully you enjoy this forum. I'd recommend taking a look at the workshop. Once you do some reading you'll find what other people have done. If you do some feedback critiques it will help your writing also - and it's a rule here (I think?). If you post two constructive critiques https://www.writingforums.org/threads/constructive-critiques.20627/ you can put up your work and get some more specific feedback which would benefit you, I hope. Generally, what are the mechanics of this force which alters reality? Mandela effect makes me think of time travelers. If you're looking to confuse your characters make sure not to confuse your readers along the way. Relatively speaking, unsettling and disturbing affect comes from association with the character(s) or interest in what happens to them. Hope this helps.
The first rule of writing is: Do not confuse the reader. So, you've set yourself a difficult task. To me, disturbing is to have the characters behave normally because they believe all is well but there is something significant about the setting that just isn't right, and they can't see it. Middle class white folks could pontificate about how upstandingly moral they are, and then be horribly cruel to their black slaves. Fantasies can be embraced in preference to reality, as a coping mechanism. A whole society and country could fall into chaos and the people can carry on regardless. I recently watched a horror short entitled 'The Dollmaker' which may give you some insight. Horror Short Film “The Dollmaker” | ALTER - YouTube
There's a movie quite identical to what you are talking about called Dark City: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/ I wouldn't watch the trailer (gives too much away) but it seems pretty bang on similar to the concept you are going for. Obviously, there are techniques you cannot use in novels that you can in movies. One being that a reoccurant actor playing different roles still has the same face. Like Aled James Taylor was saying, in a book it would be hard to keep that continuity as things keep shifting. But, I think you could have a few ways to reorientate the reader as their perception of reality shifts. One way is to borrow from movies like groundhog day or the more recent boss level, you have the shift start similarly and branch differently. Or a motiff that let's the reader know a shift is happening (I think Dark City also had this by ringing the midnight bell). A full on madness and non linearity could be achieved by something like Fight club; where you try your hardest to not acknowledge the break in reality, or convince the reader that there has been no break until the very end. Or by unreliable narrators; if you have a bunch of unreliable narrators telling different sequence of events, it could still give you the effect you are looking for without overtly causing hard to follow sequences.
Depends on what kind of disturbing you're going for, like, there's several genres mate. I'd suggest researching Twilight Zone, each episode covers a different kind of disturbing. (and different topics as well) Alternatively I here Stranger Things is REALLY good. Some people think spiders are disturbing, others think snakes are disturbing but love spiders. I don't think making a spider snake would be equally disturbing to both parties.
That's not the type of disturbing the OP is going for, it's more related to memory horror or perception of reality.
Dude, there's a NUMBER of Twilight Zone episodes that deal with perception of reality. (that's like, the main gimmick of the show and even in the intro) One episode covers a married couple moving to a new town, everything is 'too' perfect, and the only thing that sets the couple apart is that the town and everyone in it is black and white, while the couple are in color. (I don't know the name of the episode unfortunately) There's another episode about a group of people colonizing mars, but one man stays behind because he perceives the new colony on mars as superior to earth. There's an episode where one man finds out he survived the end of the world and gradually goes insane. Turns out it was some experiment by the government to see how people handle claustrophobia. Those are just the episodes I remember off the top of my head, but I'm sure there's more that go in line with what OP is looking for. The series is literal hundreds of episodes long too. Twilight Zone is basically 'mind fuck' the tv series.
To me the most disturbing movies are psychological horror in the vein of The Shining and Mulholland Drive, specifically where it's told through an unreliable narrator who is or goes insane and commits horrible acts. In particular those two, because the viewer identifies with the character and gradually learns that they're not really what they seem to be, and in fact are murderous or have murdered and are in deep denial of the fact.
"Some people think spiders are disturbing, others think snakes are disturbing but love spiders. I don't think making a spider snake would be equally disturbing to both parties." Sorry, I got confused by this part, I thought this was what you were talking about. But yes, twilight zone has many different stories that are disturbing.
Ah, that part was more me commenting that combining two disturbing things won't always disturb both parties who find either thing disturbing equally heh my bad. (they may even find said combination comical if it's too out there) One of the worst things that Twilight Zone does, you immediately get the sense that something...isn't quite right, but you can never tell what the twist is. Usually it isn't until the reveal happens that you go 'holy shit how did I not notice that!' there's a few genuinely 'whaaat' twists in there, but most of them are pretty good. I only suggested Stranger Things since it is more you know, traditional horror. I was more going with my suggestions based on the topic title.
That's all good, I was just misunderstanding it as I said. Somehow I thought you meant look for spider and snake type horror in twilight zone. I don't know why. I've only watched a few twilight zone episodes but yes, they are more about Uncanny Valley style of horror. So they are an excellent recommendation.
I was just watching a Chris Stuckman review for the show Midnight Mass, as part of his Halloween month horror movie fest, and he said this: "The real scary stuff in the world is the stuff that just kind of exists—that we just kind of accept, and it happens in broad daylight,and just down the street." To put it in context, just before this he spoke about the fact that he believes he was raised in a religious cult and didn't realize that through his youth. He said he has had a very traumatic past with religion, and he talks about "what it feels like to realize you're part of a community that maybe doesn't have your back, but they keep saying they do." I had to pause the video and come in here to post this. Here's the video if anyone is interested:
I hope we don't get too sidetracked on making horror MOVIES with this kind of disjointed reality. It's an entirely different medium. I like @Aled James Taylor 's point: Do Not Confuse The Reader. (Unless, of course, confusing the reader is the point of the story ...and it can be.) The way I would tackle something like this is very simple, actually. Start each Point Of View (POV) character in a 'normal' place. What is 'normal?' For them, anyway? The kind of 'normal' the reader will understand. Then, allow their POVs to become SLOWLY distorted. If all the POV characters start from essentially the same place, and all begin to distort along the same lines, it should be obvious to the reader what is happening. If the POV characters all know each other, they can observe changes in the others without realising they are changing themselves. Since the reader will be seeing the bigger picture, the reader will be aware they're all contradicting one another. If you start with normal and work forward with each character, you should be able to keep the reader on board—while allowing the strangeness to develop. My caution would be ...take your time. Don't be in a huge rush with this kind of story. The unreality has to creep in rather than jump in, in order to be effective. I remember reading a story, many years ago, that practically did my head in with this sort of storyline. It's entitled It Happened In Boston, by Russell Greenan. In it, the first person narrator is slowly going insane ...and very disturbingly so. Because he's an 'unreliable' narrator, we had to read between the lines, from where his observations—based on reality—became more and more distorted, as his mental state and emotional fragility detached themselves from reality. Because the initial reality was believable, and the metamorphosis happened so slowly, I was totally convinced I, too, was sharing his increasing disorientation and actually understanding and sympathising with his weird (and ultimately deadly) obsessions. It was a very strange reading experience for me, but ultimately one I have never forgotten. And I read this book back in 1972, which was a hell of a long time ago. But the memory of reading that still sticks with me. I've never had the courage to read it again!
Reminds me of a clicker game called Dark room on Android. The whole game is quite simple, you start in a room and you don't know anything. You start to gather people and start to adventure out after some apocalyptic event. You keep learning more and more about your self and the outside world. But as you gather more resources and gather more people, the game edges towards being more insidious and the language that describes people from "workers" changes to "slaves". But this happens over quite a period of time. Basically introducing elements of the story starts to warp the characters perspective into something quite dark. So working slowly like that allows for the changes to feel quite natural and inevitable rather than random and confusing. I never completed it, but it was interesting when that did start happening like that nonetheless.
It strikes me that one of the challenges will be if it's making the reader compare the characters' fictional perceptions with the storyworld's fictional reality. The tendency is for the reader to treat everything as equally fictional. If some scenes or passages are more fictional than others: what does that mean, and how to signal it? I'll try to illustrate:- 1. John saw the red lorry's grille-guard mangle the front wheel of his bicycle: everything went black. 2. The white van stopped, and a kind team in matching coats got out and gave John medicine. That's both an approach and an elucidation of the problem. I don't know how successful it is as either (!), but we can give the reader a different mental image that isn't in the words. This way relies on structural parallels: red lorry=white van; John=John... and a drawback is it can quickly get lost if the ideas we want the reader to contrast are separated by too much other text. It should still work up to any compositional scale though: we could do scenes, chapters, or even two whole novels alternating between what the character thinks happens and what does... as long as the parallels stay tight enough for the reader to notice. Or another approach might be what Elias Canetti does in 'Auto da Fe'. Lose the fictional real world entirely: just don't describe it and leave the reader to match the characters' (insane) internal monologues to a mental image of what must be happening IRL. In 'Auto da Fe' we know the mad lady thinks she is walking into the shop wearing her special beautiful dress, but at some point we start to wonder if she's naked. From the OP I got the impression that this is supposed to be a gradual dislocation of the reader from their comfort zone: the emotional journey of a building sense of unease. To do that structurally I think would need very tight writing so that the reader feels the text asking them to stretch a bit further in each successive scene. If you can get them to compare the characters' perceptions to real reality, rather than the novel's fictional reality that might help establish the 'stretch'.
