Hello, I am quite new here, and maybe someone had already posted this before, but what do you think about "dreamlike" (or using the greek word, oniric) plot? I mean, writing a plot like if we were in a dream, making the episodes happen one after the other without a real reason... I read a book of a lebanese writer, Elias Khoury, and I liked this idea. I found it also in Kafka's "the process".
I'm in favor of dream-like works but not dream fiction - why not create a dreamlike world? Why irritate a reader who takes your fantasy world as truth and then pull a gotcha angle on him by exposing it was only a dream at the end. Perfect example - the movie Boxing Helena - okay it's a stupid movie but if the viewer is going to buy into the fact that a surgeon is so obsessed with a woman that he's willing to turn her into a near replica of the Venus Demilo - armless, legless. The viewer is intrigued to see where this will go. But at the end of the movie we discover the surgeon isn't quite that obsessed and has only been dreaming this angle. It was a cheap ploy. Kafka was smart for the Metamorphosis - dream like reality in reality. That's probably the best angle to go.
I didn't mean a dream fiction where the character at the ends wakes up and finds that everything he has lived was a dream. What I wanted to say is a real "dreamlike" way of writing, where everything happens AS IF we were in a dream, where even illogic things are completely logic (ex: a man enters a shop and finds himself in a station, takes a train and he's in africa but at the same time he's cuddling penguins. But he finds this all normal because he has a perception different than the one he would have if he was awaken...
Yes, I think that could be quite cool if you can pull it off. I tried writing something like that back in the 90's ( I was a fan of Twin Peaks! ) but it was very difficult because I had to set it up that this phantasmagorical world is 'the new reality' so my reader wouldn't get confused or go oh-come-on. For me as long as the goal didn't shift ( because in dreams goals do shift continuously ) it was easier to except the weirdness - kindof like the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy always had the same goal so her world was easier to accept.
Once I tried to do something like that in my italian class, but it didn't work out. I think it's because I was too limited by the models of writing we were studying. But I will definitely try to write a short story with this technique!
I think that's definitely an interesting idea, but you'd have to have some very strong story elements--characters, and prose especially-- to make it work if the setting and the plot are going to be --not weak per say, but non-traditional and outlandish, which might be a weakness in itself, to audiences. I think you should go for it. If you can pull it off, then more power to you. But if you can't, it'd still be a good experience and good writing exercise.
