Before I start the post, in case anyone will be near Pawling, New York, this Saturday, I’m signing and talking. Details are on my website.

In August, Alexbella Sara wrote, How does one get across that a character is, to put it quite bluntly, going insane? I have one who is going insane and I don’t know how to show it.

And Lexi commented, I wrote a story where my MC temporarily lost his mind. Now I’m not saying that this is the best way to do it or anything, but when I did it, I gradually began interrupting his normal thoughts with less logical thoughts until he wasn’t thinking or saying anything sensible. I made him wonder every now and then in the beginning why he head felt so foggy, but soon he stopped wondering. And since I was writing in third person, I was able to make other characters reflect on how strange he was acting until they all knew that he was completely insane. Of course, I’m just a beginner and may not know what I’m talking about, and it may not work with your story, but just thought I’d let you know what worked for me. Hope that helps!
Lexi’s advice sounds good. Here are some more thoughts:

I’m not a psychologist, but I’m sure there are lots of ways to be crazy; schizophrenia, manic depression, multiple personality leap to mind. And every crazy person is nuts in his own unique fashion. A schizophrenic may hear voices, but Vera’s voices will say different things from Victor’s. So you may want to consider what Vera is like before she disappears around the bend. If she’s just a tad jealous, for example, and begins to hear voices, they may tell her that her best friend Zinnia has been spending an awful lot of time with their classmate Caroline. If Vera is boring, her voices may instruct her to memorize home appliance owner’s manuals.

Madness is fun! (Fun for the writer, not for a real person.) You can be inventive. You can be wild. You can design your own kind of madness. Victor can suddenly start making animal noises. Or he can spend hours licking the china in his great-grandmother’s tea set. So here’s an early prompt: List seven unheard-of symptoms of madness, symptoms you’ve made up.

Detail is crucial in establishing balminess, as in every other sort of writing. Suppose we were trying to develop me as a character going bonkers. Every morning, in actual fact, I pour my high fiber cereal into my beautiful pottery bowl made by my sister-in-law Betsy Levine (www.prescotthillpottery.com – just a little family product placement!). Suppose on the first day of the rest of my nutty life I start pouring and pouring and pouring. Cereal spills onto the counter, onto the floor, mounds around my feet because I started with a full cereal box. Reggie trots into the kitchen and scarfs up cereal, which could be bad for his stomach, but I don’t notice because I’m so involved in staring at the design on the counter top. I’m wondering why I never noticed before how the colors bleed into each other, like drops in an ocean, like souls in love, like blood in war. Reggie, sensing something amiss, barks, and I snap out of it and am surprised to see cereal everywhere.

So we can start with some little thing, pouring cereal or anything else, and make it grow. It can be a tiny comment in a conversation, a momentary thought. But it needs to be specific and in some way off.

Lana’s lunacy can be concealed. Her inner life may be crazy as a bedbug’s, but she can be entirely aware of how she’s perceived and she can keep a tight lid on herself, at least in the early stages. We often see this in crazy villains. The reader witnesses the madness in Lena’s thoughts and actions when she’s alone, but when other characters are present she’s as ordinary as green peas.

If Kevin starts out sympathetic before he falls off his rocker, the reader will suffer, maybe more than he does. He may not be aware of what he does, but we are and we squirm. Say he has a crush on Jane. Yesterday, their romance was showing promise, but today he’s wrapped his muffler around his head and is pretending to be an injured Civil War veteran, which Jane doesn’t know how to deal with.

Or, and this is exceedingly painful, if Harriet is aware of her transformation from sane to wacko and is tormented by the change, we’ll writhe with her.

You also don’t have to take the sad, sympathetic route. In my short novel, The Princess Test, the maid Trudy slowly goes berserk. The book is funny, and her descent into madness is too. So your handling of psychosis depends on the genre you’re writing in. Humorous book: humorous treatment. In fantasy, you can make up your own version of crazy. For a historical story you may need to do some research. In the Romantic-period novel Jane Eyre, Rochester’s wife is mostly heard and is glimpsed only fleetingly, but we never doubt that she’s loony. You may need research as well for a contemporary tale if you want the insanity to be realistic.

A wonderful novel about insanity is I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg, which was popular when I was a young adult. (I’d guess it’s appropriate for age twelve and up, but check with a librarian.) For high school and up there’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. I’ve never watched this horror movie or read the book because I’m a wimp, but I believe The Shining by Stephen King is an amazing portrait of someone going crazy. And an old horror movie I did see and would never ever see again (definitely on an adult level) is Repulsion. The audience gets to understand the main character’s madness from the inside out, because some of the movie is shown through her eyes. It is the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. And one of the most tragic.

As I’ve been writing this post, I’ve been aware of the multitude of synonyms for madness. I’ve used many of them, but here are some more: ape, bizarro, cracked, daft, deranged, dingy, dippy, flaky, flipped out, fruity, moonstruck, unsound, out to lunch, potty, screwy, touched, unbalanced, unhinged, unglued, wigged out. You may know additional terms. Please post any colorful ones. Why do you think we can say crazy so many ways? A little psychosis in our forebears? A little obsessiveness? Mnah hah hah!

Here are three prompts:

∙    Use yourself as an example. As you go through your day, jot down little things you could do that would show your mental deterioration. Make your mad self the main character in a short story. If you have an understanding family, try something out. Startle someone and see if it works. Then, hasten to explain.

∙    Gina, an investigative reporter, checks herself into a lunatic asylum to expose administrative abuses, but being in this environment begins to change her. She wonders why she volunteered for this particular assignment. Write how she gradually goes mental.

∙    Invent a secret government (any government) project to induce insanity in captured spies. Write how the scientists accomplish their goals. Write the effects on the prisoners. Pick a hero or heroine and write the story.

Have fun and save what you write!