In the trenches of a secluded world lived a woman
who sat by herself, drenched in utter grief after her lover departed to another
world to fetch some fish and never returned. She sat by herself, missing him.
From day till night, she sat soaked in melancholy, waiting for him, his face
swimming before her eyes.
When twilight overshadowed the sunlight, she sat in
her garden gazing at the moon, thinking that he too would be gazing at it,
remembering her. With the coming of morning sunlight, she pulled out her diary
and spent her day writing poems of loss, depression, grief, melancholy, and
yearning.
Will he ever return and meet her? The question constantly hovered
above her head. As time went by and she couldn’t hold back her longing, she
started talking to the trees, to the birds, even to the winds. She would tell
the wind to go and see whether he was on his way to her. She would ask the Sun
whether she could see her lover in another world. She would tell the trees to
rustle so fiercely that the scent of their leaves rushed through the sky and
reached him.
At night, she would whisper to the stars, telling them secrets
only he knew about her, telling them about the stories and fantasies she shared
with him before he departed to another world. Why he departed, she didn’t know.
Years passed. He didn’t return. The books in her home were overflowing with
words she felt pulsing in her heart when she missed him.
And then, one day, someone came to her house and
rang the doorbell. She opened the door. Standing there was the Mad Hatter with
a bottle of coke, a packet of potato chips, and a box of novels.
She grabbed
the bottle, guzzled down the coke, ripped the packet, wolfed down the chips,
snatched the box, and flanked shut the door to slip inside her blanket and read
all the novels.
In the words
of non-writers, this story would probably come under the category of bad jokes
or gross humor. But for writers, this can be a fabulous technique to add some
spice to their piece of writing.
The
technique is “Amplified Absurdity Technique.” As the name suggests, it presents
a piece of writing or a narrative in a way that depicts the absurdity of human
life in an amplified manner.
In contrast
to Edgar Allan Poe’s Single Effect Theory I explained in the earlier video that
is based on spinning the entire story based on one, singular emotion, the
Amplified Absurdity Technique involves an abrupt, sudden break or jump in the
initial emotion, often catching the reader by surprise.
When writing
a piece with this technique, the goal is to maintain the Single Effect right
until the final line or the ending, and then jolting the reader or the viewer
into an abrupt twist that is trivial, pathetic, darkly ironic, or grossly
humorous. The idea is to twist the initial emotion into an absurdity so instead
of following its typical loop of neurons, it takes an absurd turn and forms a
new neural pathway. Right when the initial emotion is at its peak, the twist
sends the viewer or the reader into a jaw-dropping burst of dissonance.
The
technique is based on the fundamental nature of human mind. Human mind is not a
solid block. It is a malleable entity, just like clay. Just as a jeweller uses
raw gold or silver to craft a variety of jewels, earrings, bangles, and
necklaces, the mind can be shifted or changed according to what your
intelligence wants, in a given moment. While Poe’s Single Effect Theory
re-enforces a particular emotion and amplifies it to the peak, the Amplified
Absurdity Technique drops the entire amplified cloud of emotion with a splash
of humor, irony, or an eye-opening sense of life’s weirdness.
It magnifies
the psychological conditioning or programming in the person’s mind, and then suddenly
shatters it with violation of expectation by inserting an unexpected absurdity
in the path of the initial emotion. For the writer or the storyteller,
Amplified Absurdity is also cathartic and mind-bending, as it literally enables
them to express a difficult emotion and finally shift it.
The concept
can also be related to H.P. Lovecraft’s ideas of “Horror of the Mundane,” or
the “Cosmic Horror,” that work on seeing the ridiculous in the sublime and the
sublime in the ridiculous. Lovecraft famously re-instated through his work that
human concerns are irrelevant to the vast, indifferent universe.
The Amplified
Absurdity technique helps the writer and the reader to embrace a difficult
emotion and right when the emotion is amplified to its peak, then introduce a
dissonance spike by creating a sudden, jarring jump in the emotion. From dread
to humor, for instance. It’s just like a high-speed car taking an abrupt turn.
The concept
is just like the character of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, whose
stories nobody believes but they make people feel good and cheerful. Amplified
Absurdity, this concept relies on the fact that the state of human mind can be
changed with a story that is absolutely weird, absurd, or illogical. And hence,
it can be a powerful tool, not just for writing and storytelling, but also for
self-reflection.
In the above
story, the technique amplifies the emotion of grief to its peak, ultimately
leading it into a sharp drop to advertisement-style humor and therefore,
cunningly twisting its pathway.
This
technique can also be observed in a scene in the Bollywood movie 3 Idiots.
To delve
deeper into the science behind how this Amplified Absurdity Technique works,
think of a cute white rabbit dressed in a clothing that makes it look like a
frightening fire-spitting dragon. You make the reader “believe” in the terror
of the dragon and right when they are frightened to the peak, you violate their
expectation and unmask the dragon to reveal the rabbit. First of all, this
twist creates an incongruity, a cognitive dissonance, a defamiliarization, a
dopamine spike. It disrupts the regular rhythm of thinking and bends it to
generate a new thought pattern in the brain. By introducing an absurd element,
the writer forces the reader and themselves to feel a difficult emotion to a
heightened intensity and then release it and feel something different.
The
technique is a masterful exploitation of the mind’s basic nature to shift the
current state of mind, in a cathartic or a positive manner.
The Neural
Science of Amplified Absurdity Technique
This is how
the Amplified Absurdity Technique works in the brain. At first, the target
emotion is amplified to peak intensity with consistent repetition of high-stake
elements and imagery. As the emotion reaches it peak, it activates the Amygdala,
the part of the brain that deals with processing emotions.
The amygdala signals
the other department in the brain called the hypothalamus. Hypothalamus is
responsible for triggering a fight-or-flight response, which floods the
person’s body with adrenaline or stress hormones.
Sensing the
commotion in hypothalamus, another two parts of the brain get activated. A part
called the Temporal Parietal Junction (TPJ) registers the abrupt shock, the
sudden introduction of absurdity, or the surprising break in the expectation.
Another
part, called the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC), starts processing the
“conflict” generated in the brain as a result of violated expectation, the
conflict between the predicted outcome and reality. The extreme mismatch then
activates the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC), a part that deals with flexible thinking.
The incongruity breaks the brain’s meaning management model and jolts it into
existential meaninglessness, which can sometimes be cathartic and mind-changing.
The setting sun filled the sky with orange, but
when she looked up from her room’s window, the sky appeared grey. It was a
cold, winter evening and after 6 pm, a clock on her room’s wall had stopped
ticking. Outside, a street dog yelled a frightening call. He must be feeling
cold, she wondered.
She flung a thick pink shawl on her shoulders and reached
for the attic to get an old sweater from the trunk. The wooden stairs were
rickety and old. As she climbed, they creaked.
She hadn’t climbed this staircase
in the past three months. The lights upstairs needed to be changed. Most of
them had their glass broken by an aggressive storm that came a few months ago, in
the monsoon. She had to carry a lamp as she climbed the stairs. As she put one
foot after the other, the lamp dangling from her fingers oscillated from side
to side like a pendulum. As it did, it spilled pools of glowing yellow light on
the giant paintings that hung on the side walls. The gold trimmed edges of the
paintings glittered in the lamplight. Some pools revealed expressionless faces
of her family members that looked as if they were gazing right at her, not in a
happy way.
She reached the attic and unbolted the door. Everything inside was dusty.
The murmuring dust particles formed a disturbing halo around the lamp. She
walked to the bronze trunk and tried to open it. It wouldn’t open. Its super-old
antique handle seemed to be rusting with years of neglect. She placed the lamp
on top of an empty shelf. To squeeze out maximum strength of her muscles, she
stretched her right leg from the back and started pulling on the trunk’s
stubborn handle vigorously.
It must have been close to five minutes when the
handle appeared to surrender to her will. She pulled it from the knob, swung it
upwards, and settled it against the wall. The inside of the trunk looked like
another world in contrast to the suffocating desert of dust that surrounded the
trunk.
Lounging within the dark blue velvet lining of the trunk, there were expensive
and colorful fabrics, apothecary-style glass bottles of perfume, thick
hardcover books, and boxes of mysterious trinkets that glittered in the lamplight.
She bent down to dive into this vast ocean of luxury and pulled out a silk bag.
She pulled a string and unfastened the bag and pulled out an orange sweater.
The sweater appeared to have been sewen for a toddler. Above one sleeve, near the
left shoulder, there was a ripped strand of orange wool. For just as much time
as the sound of a sparrow’s chirp lasted outside, she stared at the sweater,
lost in thoughts.
Then, as if jolted back to the present moment, she flumped
the trunk close, grabbed the lamp, and rushed down the stairs. The stairs
creaked even more, the echoes of their groaning sounds screaming at her as she
walked away towards the front door. She flanked the door open and stepped out
on the street, where she thought, was the dog that was yelling the frightening
calls due to cold.
The dog wasn’t there. She stood there for a long time. She
looked here and there, on the sides and around the neighbours’ gardens. The dog
had disappeared. Where did he go? Will he die in the winter? She looked at the
orange sweater. If he would have waited just a little bit more, she could have
saved him. With the saddening thought possessing her, she walked into the house
and closed the door tight shut.
She walked to her room, turned off the lights,
and slipped inside the blanket on her bed. Moon’s uncaring white light entered
through the window and spilled itself here and there. The curvy crests and
valleys of her blanket cast shadows on the ceiling. She was still sitting, not
lying down for sleep.
She could not know whether it was her time to sleep yet,
because the clock had stopped ticking. So she took out the orange sweater clenched
under her elbow. Faint shadows of a tree leaves crept across the floor. She didn’t
notice it. She was busy looking at the sweater, as if recalling something she
thought she had forgotten.
Then it came to her, tumbling like a rush of
chemicals inside her body. She couldn’t see in the dark but she knew that
droplets of sweat were bubbling up on her forehead, inside her chest, and
between her legs. She remembered it, scene by scene, sound by sound. As she
did, she started crying, at first in faint sobs, then in full-blown screams.
The
frightening screams shook awake a street dog from his sleep. He thought someone
around was feeling cold. He shivered. In the sky, the moon hid behind a cluster
of clouds.
What emotion this short story triggered inside you? You’ll
probably say, grief. And although, there are bits of horror, mystery, and humor
in the story as well, the primary emotion that it evoked was grief. You may
like to call its emotional cousins like melancholy, depression, sadness, or
pain, but essentially it was grief.
For this story, grief is the primary pintuck that is holding
together the entire fictional narrative. This illustrates what the celebrated
writer Edgar Allan Poe called the “single effect theory,” also known by phrases
like “unity of impression” and “unity of effect.”
According to Poe, the “single effect theory” is a brilliant way
to learn how to craft a short story. The theory states that a short story
should revolve around a single, intense emotion, such as dread, grief, anger,
fear, etc. You can refer to Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions for a full list
of emotions you can use as starting prompts for your story.
The idea of Poe’s Single Effect Theory is that every
sentence, every incident, every detail, or character should converge to provoke
one, singular, pre-conceived, desired emotion in the reader. It can also be a
single psychological or intellectual state, such as confusion or contemplation.
Nothing that is extraneous to this singular state should be added to the story.
It’s like, looking at the story as if it were a machine engineered
with various elements where each element worked together to serve a singular
purpose. You can also imagine it with the example of a song’s guitar notes. The
notes might have different leads, multiple chords, but there is always a dominant
chord that guides the rest of the melody.
Poe believed that writing isn’t a random craft born out of
spontaneous bursts of inspiration. Rather, it’s quite alike solving a
mathematical problem. A story doesn’t come out from a random burst of inspiration,
but is constructed piece by piece with words, sounds, images, and other
elements. He, himself, applied this technique in his work, where he explored
the darkest recesses of his mind, the madnesses, the obsessions, the
psychological terrors.
His poem, The Raven, is centered around the emotion of
deep melancholy. Many of his works express the emotion of poetic beauty often
linked to sadness and loss.
His “Single Effect Theory” is a fascinating lesson that also
teaches us a way of exploring our own inner psyche, where we can magnify each
emotion and lay it out bare and naked on the paper for our mind to see and
reflect. It’s a focused meditation into the self carried out on the vehicle of
words, via writing. It’s both a prompt and the way, whichever way you like to
see it, and use it.
For decades, centuries maybe, visual artists have drawn on
this proverb to feel good while writers are left gazing at the 1000-word draft
that took them a whole week to write. Not that there is any separation between
writers and artists, but there is another way to look at this proverb, that
crossed my mind.
Sometimes what one picture can say with its compact visual,
even a thousand words struggle to express. This is true, indeed. But if you are
a writer who is passionate about (or just interested in) writing, this proverb holds
a brilliant exercise you can do, to enhance not just your writing, but also
your mind.
For artists, the proverb presents a contracting exercise,
where they have to condense lots of little elements into a single frame and
present a big idea in a little space. For writers, on the other side, the
proverb presents an expanding exercise. You can call it brainstorming.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words, this picture is a
metaphorical treasure trove for you to explore ideas, new perspectives, and
kick start your writing process each time you feel the block.
This is what I mean to say. Take one picture. It can be
anything - a photograph, an
illustration, an AI image, a painting you found on Pinterest, a doodle you saved
on Instagram, an ad poster, photo from a childhood album, or even your own
selfie. Take this picture and take a good look at it. By good look, I mean, immerse
your gaze in its details – the colors, the shadows, the patterns, the textures,
the setting, the expressions (if there are characters). These details are
potent triggers and prompts for you to get your sleeves rolling and dive into a
whole writing project.
Imagine the possibilities.
One picture can help you write a thousand books. This idea
can even trigger a dramatic iteration cycle between artists and writers. Artist
will produce a picture, writer will write a thousand books, artist will read
these books and produce a different picture, writer will again write a thousand
books. And the process goes on…forever.
This is how just one idea, no matter how good or how boring
it is, can generate a whole new universe that can function on an iterative,
self-generating loop.
From a simple proverb to a writing exercise to a tantalizing
possibility…
I am impressed. I am going to try out this exercise. If you too find it exciting, do let me know!
Ever since he lost his wife to a snake bite, Telmo Tinga
transformed forever. He withdrew from the world and dedicated himself to a life
of recluse. Enshrouded by the green cloak of looming forest trees, his little
hut was both his home and his work station. For as far as his eyes could see,
the ground was enveloped in prickly carpets of long, pinny grasses. Shooting
from within these grasses, giant trees rose proudly, spreading their gnarly
branches like veins of a monster’s claws trying to posssess the blue canvas of
the sky. On most days, there wasn’t any animal in sight, let alone a human.
A
small cloud constantly hovered above his hut, raining down a perpetual drizzle
on everything that lay, stood, or hung inside his hut, an unrelenting reminder
of the intense sorrow that lingered in his heart. What would have made an
ordinary person insane, became the new normal for Telmo. After years of
battling his own grief, Telmo had befriended the hovering cloud, the constantly
drizzling water, and a strange routine where he spent his days talking to his
tools. He used these tools to craft items of furniture, home decoration, and
show pieces. At the end of every month, he visited the city to sell these items
to a big trade emporium for good amount of money.
He spent a portion of the money to buy home essentials and
saved the rest of it in his home bank for buying new tools or for the rainy
days. Rest of the days, he spent his time interacting with his tools. The
tools, like his family members, listened to his thoughts, his laments, his
sorrows, his memories, his happinesses. While he banged their tips on sheets of
metal or rubbed their blades against blocks of wood or pummelled ornamented
designs with veneer, the tools listened to his stories, with patience.
One morning when he woke up to look into the mirror, horror
struck him. The mirror was missing. There was just wall, plain mud-colored wall
in front of his eyes. This wasn’t however what horrified him. What horrified
him was what he saw when he lifted his gaze. The mirror wasn’t missing. It was
just hanging at a height. He turned around his gaze to scan other things. It
seemed, that everything had gotten enlarged into giant sizes. Even the small
cushioned chair appeared to be surpassing his own height. He jumped and hopped
on top of the chair and tried to look at himself in the mirror. The cloud
hovering above the hut continued to rain down drizzle.
Little dollops of liquid
plopping down caused one of the cushion’s edges to turn wet. He jumped over the
cushion and tried to look at his reflection in the mirror. Disbelief enveloped
him as he noticed that he was no longer a human, he was an insect, although he
still seemed to have a human mind. He could still think, describe things, have
feelings and opinions. But his body had turned into an insect, a giant beetle
with silver-black metallic body, a tiny round head with two antenna erupting
from it and two googly eyes.
Telmo noticed that his metallic body had soaked up all the
water from the cushion. The cushion was now dry. He jumped on the ground where
the drizzle had wetted it. He noticed that his body again soaked up the
drizzle. Telmo stepped out of the hut and started crawling towards the roof. Once
he reached the roof top, he took a long jump to try and touch the hovering
cloud. He latched on to the cotton candy-like cloud and shifted his body on top
of it, in the same way he had been sitting on the cushion. His body started
soaking up the moisture in the cloud. Within a few moments, his body had sopped
up all the water. The cloud dissolved in the mist and Telmo dropped on the
roof, his belly holding all the water his body had absorbed.
Crouching underneath a mallet, he slept. The next day he
woke up, he felt different. His chest felt open, his abdomen pulsing with warm
swirls of breath, his head dizzy yet light. He looked up. The hovering cloud had
vanished. He settled down to work on a lamp he had been working on before he
turned into an insect. He tried to talk to his tools, but the tools wouldn’t
respond, as if their squeaky, creaky voices had died, along with the hovering
cloud. Extreme silence jolted Telmo into an intense pang of loneliness and
longing. He couldn’t hold back anymore. He slumped down on the ground and burst
into tears. He kept crying until evening, then sat there gazing at the fleeting
colors of the sky. Golden, orange, pink, purple, blue, black.
Night set in. He walked inside the hut and embraced his late
wife’s photo. He no longer felt grief of her loss. He was ready to move on.
The following morning, while he was working on the lamp, a
group of travellers emerged from the cover of grassy bushes and approached his
hut. Reaching the door of the front courtyard, one of them walked towards a
small jewellery cabinet Telmo had left out to dry after a coat of paint. Others
walked around, gazing at other items that lay scattered in the courtyard. Returning
to Telmo, they gave him a big order. He was to create thousand bamboo-glass
chairs, for which he would get about 10 million rupees.
For the next few months, he dedicated himself to creating
bamboo-glass chairs, each daubed with a doodle of his wife’s face and the
initial of her name. Once the project was over, he collected all the photos and
belongings of her and bid them a farewell by burning. He had liberated both
himself and her, something which she would have wanted for him if he could talk
to her. He assembled his ash in a tub, poured it in a forest river, and walked
away, seeking a new partner and his dreams of success.
Apart from being interesting and entertaining, the tale of
Telmo Tinga is a fantastic example that illustrates a storytelling concept popularized
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Called “Magical Realism,” the concept, as its name
suggests, is a writing strategy where elements of magical or supernatural
worlds are presented as natural parts of realistic world, often with a very
mundane and matter-of-fact tone or realistic setting.
The concept allows the writer to explore the realm of magic
to illuminate the real. With the introduction or intrusion of magic,
supernatural, impossible, unrealistic, bizarre, uncanny, or unusual elements,
the writer presents the fusion of realistic and magical/fantastic. Boundaries
between speculation/magic and reality are blurred. The aim, is to express
emotions and normalize magic with amalgamation and practical integration of
magic and reality.
What elements in this story illustrate the concept of
“magical realism”?
1.Normalization of the fantastic – The perpetual
cloud hovering above Telmo’s hut, constantly raining drizzle, represents a
fantastical metaphor for the intense grief and unending sorrow that prevails in
his heart. Yet the cloud is depicted in an entirely natural and realistic
setting.
2.Fusion of realism and fantasy – Telmo’s story
involves a blend of the magical and the mundane. The secluded hut in the forest
and the hovering cloud; his job as a craftsman, selling goods in the city, and
the talking tools.
3.Anthropomorphism with magical tools as a Coping
Mechanism – Telmo’s core routine, where he talks to his tools as if they were
his family members or friends, represents anthropomorphism, a concept where
human characteristics are attributed to non-human entities. While drenched in
extreme isolation and the profound grief of losing his wife, Telmo uses these
magical “talking tools” as a psychological coping strategy. The loss of the
cloud and the subsequent silence of the tools at the end represents his mind no
longer needing to project that connection—the coping mechanism is dissolved
because his grief is gone.
4.Thermodynamics and Phase Transition (The Insect
Transformation and Metamorphosis) - Telmo's instantaneous and unexplained
transformation into a small, metallic, water-absorbing insect that retains a
human mind. - This radical, magical/dream-like physical change is presented as
a simple/realistic event. The insect is depicted to possess a magical ability
of swallowing up grief (water). This small metallic creature soaks up the
moisture from the cushion, the ground, and finally, the hovering cloud. This
element depicts the scientific concept of “thermodynamic equilibrium.”
With the act of physically absorbing the
energy of grief, Telmo’s body naturally arrives at a state of emotional
stability or thermodynamic equilibrium, thereby, transforming into a healed
state.
5.Magical Companionship and extreme ecology: the
story presents Telmo in an extreme environment of isolation and recluse where
he relies on the magical and supernatural elements as a crutch to manage his
emotions. The description of "prickly carpets of long, pinny grasses"
and giant trees forming "gnarly branches like veins of a monster’s claws"
emphasizes a wild, aggressive environment hostile to human connection.
Extreme isolation, recluse, and grief forces him into an
emotional breakdown and eventually, symbiosis. While the cloud of intense
sorrow constantly hovers above him, the tools act as his companions in
catharsis, listening to his sorrows. When the cloud finally bursts, his reality
collapses and he is jolted into a rapid symbiosis. Turning into an insect,
which essentially is a materialization of his sorrow, he drinks up the grief, and
moves on into radical acceptance. Eventually, his reality starts to shift. He
begins to heal. He receives the big order and he feels ready to move into a new
life, a transformed version of himself.
Telmo's journey from paralyzing grief to emotional liberation,
with the magical happenings serving as symbols of his internal state and
necessary steps toward healing. His old biology, his old ecosystem, his old
mind are now just history. By the end of the story, Telmo turns into an
entirely new person. So, basically, the story uses elements of magic and
fantasy to shift his reality from old to new. This fusion and intersection of
realism and magic is what marks this storytelling device.
