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I'm hanging out with Roxanne at Roxanne's Realm today for the Deep Down Things Virtual Book Tour. My guest post is about how to write crazy. How do you write crazy? It's quite a challenge. Here's an excerpt:
What we do as writers is try to portray in words what it feels like to be alive. In some cases, we’re trying to show what it’s like in extreme situations ~ what it feels like to die or to go crazy. Sometimes this comes from experience, but sometimes we have to extrapolate from we know and we’ve heard from others. (Good fiction often needs research, just like nonfiction.)
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See, that’s the problem. How do you portray “crazy”? We use the term to discount someone and push them away and try NOT to understand them, but as a writer you can’t do this. You’re trying to show the specific ways that their thoughts prompt their antisocial actions. But, unless they’ve become catatonic or had a severe break, you have to make this understandable to a reader. With Jackdaw, I wanted to show that he’s rational, but his rationality has gone beyond. He makes what seems like a logical decision, but that decision is horrible (trying not to spoil the ending for you).
I hope you'll stop by! I'm so honored to be there!
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