Fear of Insanity

Welcome back for the nineteenth day of Writober. Today we’re exploring our third universal fear: loss of autonomy through the fear of insanity.

Insanity is defined as a severely disordered state of the mind. In the nineteenth century it became less literally used as meaning extreme folly or unreasonableness. Fear of insanity, is the fear of losing control of one’s own thoughts and behaviors.

Rhetorical Device: Synesthesia

Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in some people who experience more than one sense simultaneously like seeing colors and shapes when listening to music, or tasting words. Kandinsky, one of the first abstract artists had synesthesia and described his experience of seeing sounds in his book, Point and Line to Plane. As a rhetorical device, synesthesia is describing one sense in terms of another..

Fighting Fear of the Blank Page: Give yourself a new perspective by creating your own synesthesia.

Simulate synesthesia: Color-coded alphabet -Assign a unique color to each letter of the alphabet and see how words look visually when written out. You can do this with colored pens, or with text color in your word processing program. In Word you can use Find and Replace for each letter, and use the Advanced Options where you can format the font type, color and size.

*Quick Note about links in this post: I am an amazon associate, so most of the links in my post will take you to amazon products. If you buy from these links, I will make some pennies which will help me pay for this site and my creative endeavors.

OctPoWriMo

Poetry Toolbox

These are quick exercises that I hope you’ll do every day. We will build on these exercises throughout the month.

Word list: Write down the first ten words you think of when you think of fear. Any words at all. Anything that comes to mind. Then choose your three favorite and say them aloud a few times until you hear the accented and unaccented syllables (if more than one syllable) and notice the duration of each syllable. (Inspired by Frances Mayes’ list of a hundred favorite words in The Discovery of Poetry)

I created this Excel Spreadsheet for you to use to collect and explore your fear words.

OctPoWriMo wordlist Download

2. Sensory Imagery: In your journal or a word processing file, fill in these lines as quickly as you can. Notice they are slightly different from last week. You may want to revisit one or two in more detail if you’re inspired and have time.

I didn’t see

I didn’t hear

I can’t carry

I didn’t smell

I wouldn’t follow

The dead end road

The frustration of

I can’t taste

The burn of

I witness

I touch but don’t feel

(Inspired by a week one exercise in the poetry chapter of The Portable MFA in Creative Writing)

3. More Sensory Imagery: Ask yourself sensory questions about fear of insanity.

4. Choose one poem to study all week: Read your chosen poem again. Look at one stanza at a time. Any new ideas? Learn more about the poet. Read some other poems by the poet. Are any lines still giving you trouble? Write about it in your journal.

Poetry Building

Synesthesia as a rhetorical device uses input from one sense to describe another. Today’s a great day to use your warm-up sensory descriptions. Use what you wrote for “What does insanity taste like?” and use it to describe what insanity sounds like.

Example poem: Today we’re looking at insanity through the poem Despair by H. P. Lovecraft, copied here from hplovecraft.com for educational purposes. You may also want to take another look at Lovecraft’s Nemesis from Day 4.

Despair
By H. P. Lovecraft

O’er the midnight moorlands crying,
Thro’ the cypress forests sighing,
In the night-wind madly flying,
Hellish forms with streaming hair;
In the barren branches creaking,
By the stagnant swamp-pools speaking,
Past the shore-cliffs ever shrieking;
Damn’d daemons of despair.

Once, I think I half remember,
Ere the grey skies of November
Quench’d my youth’s aspiring ember,
Liv’d there such a thing as bliss;
Skies that now are dark were beaming,
Gold and azure, splendid seeming
Till I learn’d it all was dreaming—
Deadly drowsiness of Dis.

But the stream of Time, swift flowing,
Brings the torment of half-knowing—
Dimly rushing, blindly going
Past the never-trodden lea;
And the voyager, repining,
Sees the wicked death-fires shining,
Hears the wicked petrel’s whining
As he helpless drifts to sea.

Evil wings in ether beating;
Vultures at the spirit eating;
Things unseen forever fleeting
Black against the leering sky.
Ghastly shades of bygone gladness,
Clawing fiends of future sadness,
Mingle in a cloud of madness
Ever on the soul to lie.

Thus the living, lone and sobbing,
In the throes of anguish throbbing,
With the loathsome Furies robbing
Night and noon of peace and rest.
But beyond the groans and grating
Of abhorrent Life, is waiting
Sweet Oblivion, culminating
All the years of fruitless quest.

How does this poem make you feel? How did Lovecraft express the fear of insanity?

Today’s prompt: Write a poem exploring the fear of insanity using synesthesia.

Form: If you’re looking for more of a challenge, write your poem as a Ghazal.

Writober Flash Fiction

Write a story with a beginning, middle, and end with conflict that leads to change in less than a thousand words (no minimal word count) inspired by one of the images in the Loss of Autonomy folder of the Writober 2024 Pinterest board. How does fear of insanity skew your character’s perceptions?

NaNo Prep

Let’s continue looking at creating movement in Act 2 inspired by Novel Writing Blueprint Workbook: A Storyteller’s Journal by Jill Harris.

Hurting: How does your character get hurt? Physically and mentally. How does your character deal with pain?

Failing: What does your character try and how does s/he fail? How does your character deal with failure?

Observing: Who or what does your MC observe? What does s/he learn?

Analyzing: What does your MC need to analyze? Does s/he need professional assistance? Ask for help from an ally? What new information comes from this analysis?

Halloween Photography Challenge

Take a photograph that depicts insanity or fear of insanity and link to your photo in the chat.

Get Moving

Now that you’ve read all the prompts and have all these ideas running around in your head, it’s time for motion. Today’s suggestion: Linnea Quigley’s horror workout