 Drama: January 06, 2016 Issue [#7388] |
  Drama
This week: Sweeten Your Fiction with Paranoia Edited by: Joy  
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“You can’t write novels without a touch of paranoia. I’m paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to.”
Kurt Vonnegut
“Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.”
William S. Burroughs, Ghost of Chance
"The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening.
Nobody is in control.
The world is rudderless...”
Alan Moore
Happy 2016! I wish you all a happy, healthy, prosperous, and productive year. I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about the use of paranoia in writing fiction.
Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback and encouragement.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Did you ever create a character who goes around the place feeling watched and monitored and, as a result, acts strangely? If you did, you created a paranoid character.
Shirley Jackson did it, too, in her story Paranoia, about a businessman who is on his way home to see his wife on her birthday when he becomes convinced that he is being followed. Shirley Jackson wasn’t the only one who used paranoia as an effective tool for suspense or tension or humor. Thomas Pynchon’s work is obsessed with paranoia, also. Most of his stories use paranoia or imply it effectively. Stephen King’s epic, Stand, shows an apocalyptic view with characters that are plausible yet unnerving. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop believes the V-2 rocket and its agents are out to get him just like Yossarian in Catch-22.
Talking about movies, many of you may recall Max with his paranoia and cluster headaches in the Life of Pie. Then, another film, Vanilla Sky--based on Alejandro Amenabar's Abre Los Ojos, starring Penelope Cruz-- features a character with paranoia who has a fragile grip on reality.
These are not the only examples. A great number of fictional works and movies use paranoia with fascinating results. At first, such stories were thought to be bizarre and sensationalistic, which brings Kafka to mind, but later on, writers began to explore the construction and meaning of reality. This gave way to overlapping genres, noir films, and dystopian fiction.
Paranoia in fiction may imply that the story may only be a delusion of the characters, instead of treating it as an alternate history or an in-fiction universe. Sometimes in these stories an unreliable narrator is used very effectively. An unreliable narrator is one whose words cannot be taken for real, at least, some of the time. He may be a person who cannot tell the story objectively for he may be bragging or bringing someone else down or he may be dishonest by nature and deceptive at the same time or he may not have the correct or complete information. His undependability may not be obvious to the reader at all, or it might be revealed gradually, or it might come as a revelation or surprise at one time or another to deliver a serious plot twist. A good example for an unreliable narrator from an earlier work is in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. Ford himself could have been such a character like Dowell, his unreliable narrator in the book, as he had very difficult relationships with just about all the other authors of his time. It is possible that his work has reflected his personality.
As a writer, just imagine all that you can do with such a protagonist or narrator even if you have a much more reliable character than Ford's. Imagine how you can blur the line between appearance and reality and make your readers think and question reality from a variety of perspectives. For example, you may let your characters or your protagonists feel threatened and have them sound off on the unlikely sources, and you may even have them experience a group psychosis or face a mysterious entity or situation.
A few simple steps for writing such a story could be:
 Think of the perspective. Will the story question reality from the psychological, political, or philosophical point of view or a mixture of all three?
Outline the details as to the characters, plot, theme, events, scenes, time, and place.
Come up with a list of symbols, metaphors, and allegories that will make the storytelling dream-like and perplexing.
Find a narrative voice that is probably subjective so it creates that paranoid mood. Your narrator may be deluded, biased, or uninformed. If you select a voice that will narrate objectively, then make the reader doubt that voice in some way.
At the conclusion, resolve the paranoia and delusions or, if you wish, leave them hanging. I would opt for resolving, but there are some famous stories with endings in which the delusions are still there at the conclusion.
Until next time! 
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 This Issue's Tip: While rewriting, pay special attention to each sentence. An intriguing sentence contains not only imagery and emotion but also something unanticipated or magical.
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Feedback for "Theme in Movies"
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Princess Megan Snow Rose 
Thank you for a great newsletter and including one of my "Twilight" items. I like the guidelines about story themes. Love: Megan
Thanks for the feedback, Megan. I like your stories.
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Quick-Quill 
I have trouble with Theme. I finally figured out its the basic story. I.e A man and a woman meet. Theme The woman is married to the president=Premise. The man is the president's Chief of Staff, and so on you build the story one layer at a time.
Layering would help build just about anything. Theme sometimes pokes its head out of all those layers on its own even when the writer is not certain what her theme is.
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An apple a day.... 
Theme is where I have gotten bogged down in my memoir. I keep looking for it but haven't found it yet, and I think it's because I'm holding back on saying some things. And finishing a memoir seems so final, almost like losing a friend. Thanks for sharing some information that can guide me.
I suggest you write what your memoir is about in one sentence or in one short paragraph that is not more than three sentences. Then see if you can figure out the theme.
As to holding back, everyone does it; people cannot or would not like to write everything in their memoirs.
Congratulations for finishing your memoir, but I think you are missing the writing of it. Why not continue it in a second volume?
And thanks for the input.
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