Storytelling Week Day Three: Writing Nonsense

In Alice in Wonderland, eating can make you grow and drinking can make you shrink. Caterpillars can smoke hookah pipes and little girls can float through keyholes. Welcome to the world of surrealism, where only the writer’s own rules apply. There is no reason at all for your fiction to resemble reality. Sometimes, you can teach larger lessons and explore more truth in a magical realm.

Literary types have developed all kinds of theories about Alice. Some say the rabbit hole is a birth canal. Alice is born through it, and Wonderland is all she encounters as she grows into adulthood. Some say the book is really just the exploration of a drug addict. It’s easy to see why, but not all theories make as much sense. Some say the book is about eating disorders. Some say it’s about the War of the Roses.

Alice’s adventures can become anything you choose. The imagination can do a lot with nonsense, and Alice’s world has plenty of that. The story is one of the most famous examples of surrealism ever written.

And surrealism is more than just nonsense. It tries to build a bridge between the conscious and subconscious mind. Embracing crazy ideas isn’t enough. Those ideas must have a purpose, so while one of surrealism’s most important elements is the eschewing of artistic convention to create something new, the writer always remains in control.

Like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, surrealism tempts us to ask difficult questions we might otherwise ignore. If you Google “Lessons from Alice in Wonderland,” you’ll turn up pieces from LinkedIn, Inc.com, and Business Wonderland. Yep, Alice can teach you business lessons, too, but what does she teach us about life?

Well, let me give you a few quotations:

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Or

“You're entirely Bonkers. But I will tell you a secret, All the best people are.”

Or

“I don’t see how he can ever finish, if he doesn’t begin.”

Those are stellar examples of how one writer turned nonsense into lessons nobody could ever misunderstand. That’s control. That’s surrealism at its finest.