Scarecrow - Flash fiction

 

Keep It Blue - Parable #storytelling

 

The Road Not Taken - Short Story #storytelling

 

Search of Red - Short Story - AI film

 

Kidnapped - Short Story

 

Mystery of the repeating sign

 

Radiation-eating vampire

 

The green-stone necklace

 

Magical Purple Flowers

 

Overwhelm - Short inner monologue film

 

I entered my room and slouched on the bed. I grabbed the folded blanket kept on my side, wrung it loose, and flopped it over my legs. It was cold and I needed warmth. The blanket trembled like non-circular ripples and long ribbons someone’s shaking from a stick. I sat there and started thinking about a feeling I was feeling in that moment. I couldn’t find a word from my memory to describe this feeling. I kept thinking, and meanwhile, turned my head to stare on an untidy pile of notebooks that lay on the bed and on the side table and all around me. My head was buzzing with thoughts and I needed to quieten their restless voices by giving them shelter in a notebook. But then I started thinking which notebook should I choose to do this task. It was a huge and laborious task. First, I needed to organize these voices in different categories and in the second step, I needed to see which notebook was to be assigned to thoughts of a particular category. So, now I was thinking about two things. One, finding a word to describe the feeling that I was feeling and second, which notebook should I select from the heaps to write down the thoughts spinning in my head. Both steps. I was still jostling with these two tasks when a third one popped up. A question that left me curious and terrified at the same time. Do I have all the words I need in my memory to describe everything I want, now or in the future? If not, then it’s a crisis. The thought jolted me in a bad cognitive dissonance. The emotion of insecurity gripped me. And envy. What if the other writer, who I despise, knows some words that I don’t? I clenched my fists. My fingers were sweaty and my elbows were quivering. My eyes became glassy with an intrusive pang of fear, the fear of impending doom, doom of my writing career. And before I could overcome this fear, I remembered that I still hadn’t found the word to describe the feeling that I was feeling a few moments ago and I hadn’t even selected a notebook for putting down my restless thoughts. I sat there, inside the warm blanket, frozen. And glassy eyed. After thinking some more for a while, I ditched the heap of notebooks. I regretted and mourned the loss of my ability to retrieve a suitable word to describe that feeling. And I apologized to my restless thoughts because since I hadn’t selected a notebook, I couldn’t do anything about them. After all these cathartic, therapeutic, and healing rituals, I pulled my laptop and wrote down all the things I had just did ever since I started feeling that feeling. I wrote everything down. And then suddenly, I realized, that I could describe that feeling with the word “overwhelm.”

 

And the moment I wrote this word, the restless thoughts quietened down and I no longer needed a notebook to write them down. Now caught red-handed for the feeling they were trying to evoke within me, they settled down, crankily on my shoulders, around my ears, and inside my fingers, well-mannered but frantic, like crowds of refugees in a shelter camp or drops of dew on a tree. And then I took the lead and started calling them one by one. One by one they could come to me and report their stories and questions and worries and I could write these down.

“Fear of losing my identity”

Okay, next. “How to deal with the feeling of overwhelm?”

Well, you write it down.

Inspiring dialogue between a monk and a man

 

Hooham: What is fear?

OrangeGuy: Fear is the projection of a memory from the past into the future. You cannot be afraid of something you haven’t experienced before.

Hooham: Why fear is created?

OrangeGuy: Depends on how your mind is designed to work. Fear is created from pain and ignorance. If you have experienced getting eaten by a crocodile before, you will feel the fear the next time you approach a crocodile. If you have listened to so many people talk in fear about something, you will experience fear when you experience that thing in your life.

Hooham: Can it be changed?

OrangeGuy: Yes, mind can be changed. But not until you are identifying yourself with the mind.

Hooham: Am I fear or am I fearless?

OrangeGuy: Whether you think you are fear or you think you are fearless, you are that.

Hooham: So from now on I will believe that I am fearless.

OrangeGuy: Whatever you believe, you become. Whatever you know, you are. 

Joan Didion’s “Single Observation” Technique of Writing

 

Imagine you work as a ghost investigator and you’ve been sent to a forest to investigate a ghost who resides in the heart of a secluded underground cave. You need to travel to the forest, catch the ghost, and report all the details to your department. 

When you arrive in the forest, there are a lot of details you can report to your department. The trees, the animals and birds, the flowers, the fragrant breeze, the various sounds, the rocky walls of the cavern, the bats and bugs; and all. Will you stop by and report these details to your office or march right into the cave and report the details of the ghost?

Joan Didion’s writing style, also called “Single Observation and Sparse Prose” bypasses the superfluous or unnecessary details from a piece of writing and jumps right into the “shimmering” highlight. Joan starts her novels with a shimmering “picture in mind” and her job is to decipher the grammar and the grammatical structure behind these images. The technique works on “omission as power.”

As Tom Stevenson writes, 

"Subtracting, Not Adding, Is The Path To A Happier Life." 

Didion’s principle works in the same way.

 

In writing, “single observation” is a stylistic device, but it can also be looked upon as a “philosophy of perception.” In the same way a wild animal strips away the prey’s skin, layer by layer, gnawing it down to the bone, a piece of writing is stripped away of all the adjectives that are not required or are unnecessary to the story. Didion emphasizes on exposing the underlying structure of a situation, to make the reader feel its cold, hard reality underneath.

Didion often described this type of writing as a whirlpool of vertigo and nausea. The technique commits to structural austerity, raw honesty, and an uncompromising “form-follows-function” technique while stripping away too much of flowery descriptions or sentimentality with brutal dispassion and cold detachment. It’s like focusing a camera so devotedly on one crack in a road that the crack unfolds the entire city’s map and its backstory. She often builds the piece around a single, piercing or devastating observation, from a scene, a dialogue, an object, or any other element.

 

The Science: The Brain Process

Why does this "less is more" approach hit so hard? It involves several key neurological and cognitive mechanisms.

 

It reduces “noise”

The very sad, lonely, and depressed woman sat quietly on the library bench, apparently trying to read a book.

A sentence like this cluttered with multiple adjectives and adverbs makes things difficult and noisy for the brain. It overwhelms the brain with high cognitive load on the language processing centers.

 

By assimilating a cluttered description into a pointed focus concentrates the energy of the brain, controls the information, and declares it quickly rather than elaborating it with long-stretched descriptions. Not that description is bad, but this is just one of the ways we can experiment with our writing.

 

It exercises the brain with “predictive coding”

Since the writing style only enables very sparse, tight, and specific description of the story, it is left to the reader to fill the gaps in this description, which makes them an active co-creator of the story, rather than just being on the other side of it. In the world of science, this process is called “predictive coding.”

 

Reaches straight into the subconscious mind

Abstract concepts or sensory details might trigger certain emotions in a person, but the “single observation” bypasses the world of thoughts, intellect, and senses, and directly reaches into the depths of the subconscious mind, making the reader “experience” the coldness or the sadness, rather than just painting a picture of it. It is the written equivalent of the psychological concept “emotional distancing.”

Read more on Craft of Writing and Storytelling!

Vocabulary Sponging - How brain absorbs words while you read a book of fiction?

 

You are reading a book and you come across a word that is new to you. You type the word in Google search or pull out your dictionary to check its meaning. And like this, a new word gets lodged in your brain in that moment. You are strolling in the park and you pass by a group of young guys who utter a slang word that you have never heard before. Again, you type the slang in Google search box and check its meaning. Another word gets stored in the vocabulary database of your brain. Then one day, an elderly relative visits your house and as she’s talking to your parents in the native language, she says a word that you feel is interesting, and you jot it down in your notebook.

 

Every day (If you are a writer, then every moment probably), your brain absorbs zillions of new words, meticulously collecting them from the world, from your experiences, from books, and information, and storing them in your inner library. How does this happen? Why are we humans able to learn new words while the lion and the ants seem totally helpless and incapable of grasping them. Unless it is a movie with animal characters, you wouldn’t likely hear a bear say “hey dude, what’s up?” or a crocodile tell you that he would like to remain “lowkey.”

And even though every creature has its own vocabulary, humans alone can grasp it in a way that no other creature can, thanks to their super-intelligent brain.

 

Vocabulary sponging refers to a subconscious process in which a person’s brain acts like a sponge. As they read a book of fiction, this sponge absorbs or extracts interesting words from the book. The brain doesn’t just absorb a word, it also absorbs its meaning, also generates interpretations related to it, and decides when and how it can be used. Until then, the word will be stored in the brain’s vocabulary database.  

 

When it comes to learning words and retaining them in memory, fiction proves way better than just ordinary dictionaries, manuals, or encyclopaedias. You are more likely to recall a word that you learned while reading a short story more than a word you learned from a typical vocabulary flashcard. In fact, many of the words were originally coined or invented in fiction novels. These words come under the category of “neologisms.”

 

For example, the slang “nadsat” was coined in Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange. Famous terms like “freelance,” “Big Brother,” and “Catch-22” too were first used in famous novels.

 

Science behind the process of “Vocabulary Sponging”

What happens in your brain when it absorbs a new word like a sponge and stows it away in your vocabulary database?

 

Well, first of all, it does something called the “Inferential Mapping” to fill the unobserved gaps or empty areas in the brain using the newly-inputted information of the word.

 

The mapping process involves three parts of the brain - Visual Word Form Area (VWFA), Wernicke’s Area, and Hippocampus.

 

Neural Triangulation

This mapping starts with a process called “neural triangulation.” The brain activates three of its regions to decode the word’s meaning. A region called the “Visual Word Form Area (VWFA)” scans and studies the visual form or the physical shape of the letters.

 

The second part, called the Wernicke’s Area processes the linguistic meaning, syntax, and other details of the word. The Hippocampus, the emotion manager, starts forming connections between this new word and your existing memories. Using these details, the brain constructs a “High-Dimensional Semantic Space,” where it pins the word based on its neighbouring words.

 

 

The second step is “Statistical Induction”

Human brain is a fabulous pattern-recognition machine. When it encounters a new or unfamiliar word like “pulchritudinous,” it starts the process of “statistical induction.” It starts associating this new word with words like “beautiful,” “radiant,” or “stunning.” Based on how and where the word is used, it calculates the probability of the word’s correct and nearest meaning. A part called the “Inferior Frontal Gyrus” or the “context checker” narrows down the word’s meaning through elimination of unsuitable ones.

 

The third step is simply deep encoding through repetition

When your brain picks up a new word from a book, novel, or a story, your brain initiates the process of “narrative transport” by releasing chemicals like oxytocin and dopamine. These chemicals signal the brain that the information being processed is important and needs to be paid attention to. In fiction, this impulse becomes even more charged up due to the addition of emotion. Amygdala’ the brain’s emotional center, becomes active. The more books you read, the more this process triggers in the brain, the deeper new vocabulary gets encoded in the brain.

Inside a part called the “temporal lobe,” the brain creates a placeholder or marker for the new word. Another part, called the prefrontal cortex, uses the story to fill the placeholder. And then, the next time you read that word, the brain fires that neural pattern again. By repetition of this process, the new word becomes assimilated in your memory.

 

Let’s explore this fascinating feature with a short story:

 

 

Solmikki was standing in his grand bedroom in the hilltop castle. Outside the window, sun was dressing up in orange lipstick, bidding farewell for the day and returning to the other part of the world. Flanked by mountains on all sides, the castle was glittering with snow at this time of the year.

Inside the vast bedroom, dead tree logs were making crackling sounds. On a table covered in satin spreads, tiny golden-yellow flames flickered from the tops of three fancy silver-black candlesticks. Up above on the ceiling, two chandeliers collected their light and spitted it throughout the room. Silhouettes of sparkles were dancing on the walls and on the floor, on a patch near the bed’s foot and one where the bookshelf stood. 

Slinging from the upper-third compartment of the bookshelf, a hardcover book, as thick as the potbelly of the castle’s chef, was quivering. The gold foil calligraphy on its front cover was pulsing. It wasn’t an ordinary day for the book. 

It was, in fact, the most auspicious day of the year when Solmikki would pull out the book from the shelf and pick a magic spell from the book and cast it with his ancestral magic wand. Dressed in royal, velvety robes, Solmikki proceeded towards the bookshelf to pick up the Magic Book of Spirit Invocations. 

He pulled out the book. Abraduberahoohoodaamissishoobashoobashoobadimritonnhootanaashtuhootanaashtusumhmmmrooooisshhhh aahhh!

He had just finished reciting the spell and was about to wave his magic wand when something diverted his attention. He stopped. He turned his head and saw two large glowing yellow eyes staring at him from the glass window. Solmikki shivered and recoiled in horror. 

One moment was already gone. To avoid wasting another, he rushed to the second window, pushed open its wooden shackles and peered through the glass. A gigantic purple arm reached out to him from an open slit in the glass and started tickling the hair on his head with its pointy, hair-covered, claw-like fingers. 

Solkmikki fainted and collapsed on the floor. His scream was so nimble that it wouldn’t even have reached the servant in the adjoining room, let alone his guards. Outside the castle, the monster untethered the castle from the mountain of ice, towed it on his back, and proceeded to take it to the land where his master Googoodonyn was waiting. 

For years, Googoodonyn had his eyes set on Solmikki’s magic powers and his kingdom. After waiting for four thousand eighty two years, he had decided to abduct the entire castle and hire Solmikki in his utterly-shadowy BluBlaBoo kingdom. 

Meanwhile, a traveller named Nanto was leisurely strolling down a mountain slope when a glossy black book fell near his shoes. He picked it up. On the cover, bright golden letters were pulsing like metallic mirrors. He tossed the book in his bag and continued walking towards his home.

Different elements of vocabulary in this short story, including words and phrases, will trigger different areas of the brain to lodge themselves in the brain.

 

For example, the Spell: “Abraduberahoohoodaamissishoo...” When the brain hears this gibberish term, at first it feels puzzled because it cannot grasp its meaning or associate it with a word or phrase. So, the prefrontal cortex looks at the narrative setup instead to decide how to categorize the term. After reading that the character of Solmikki pulled out a Magic Book of Spirit Invocations and recited this term, the brain stows it away under the category of “incantations.”

Another word from the book, the name “Googoodonyn” signifies to the brain that it is related to a powerful character or a villainous entity due to the narration associated with it in the story. Since he is the type of character who had his eyes set on Solmikki’s kingdom and someone who abducted this character, his name, though bizarre, is stored in the brain with the association of a villain.

Another word, the kingdom’s name “BluBlaBoo” also illustrates this process. Although the sound of this word indicates that the word refers to something bouncy, babylike, or rhythmic, the story actually depicts it as a “shadowy” kingdom. By creating a contrast between the babylike vibe displayed by the sound of the word and the context “shadowy,” the reader stores the word with the association of uncanny or dark fiction, something that is strange and sinister.

 

The name of the character Nanto, who arrives in the ending of the story, is stored in the brain through the process of “associative mapping.” Although the brain is not too familiar with Nanto, it knows that this character discovered Solmikki’s book on the hill. So, the brain creates a “neural bridge” between the two characters to recall the word from the memory whenever required in the future.

 

Lastly, the word “Nimble” used in the story shows how fiction can “redefine” vocabulary. Nimble, the word generally refers to quick and light in movement. In this story, it seems to refer to something which is “small, faint, and delicate.”

Read more on Craft of Writing and Storytelling!

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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.

 

Read more on Craft of Writing and Storytelling!

Edgar Allen Poe’s Single Effect Theory – A Technique to Craft Crisp Short Stories - The Frightening Scream

 

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.