Amplified Absurdity Technique of Storytelling #writing #storytelling

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.

 

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