: Re: Can a scene be written to be disorienting and not be too confusing to readers? I've written a scene in a short story where the character and her party are suddenly attacked in the night.

@Candy753

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I personally think you shouldn't shy from conveying the experience of the disorientation as long as the narrator clearly conveys their confusion so we get into their experience of it, rather than our own.

I spun, then was face down on the floor, without even the memory
of falling. Or had I never gotten up? I couldn't make any sense of
it. Had I been found by the werewolves?"

Because the experience is filtered through the narrator's expressed confusion, we don't care if it doesn't make any sense because we have faith that we'll understand when the narrator does.

Furthermore, I must disagree with the statement that "You cannot reproduce the effect of dullness and garrulity without being dull and garrulous."

Consider the following example:

Frank's life was deeply, unremittingly ordered. The sameness of every day
leached the colors from his world until he found himself fantasizing about
horrible, terrible things happening to him. The promise of seeing the
vivid red of his own blood, the exquisite pain of a shattered hand or foot
called to him to break the gray sameness of his life.

But still he did nothing.

Until the morning when he woke up with the sure knowledge that he had to
die if he wanted to truly live.

Do we not feel Frank's boredom and desperation without being bored or feeling our own desperation while reading it?

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