The Place For My Writers Notes

Original Posting 15 May 2010

Writer's Digest, March April 2009, page 13, has an exercise excerpted from The 4 AM Breakthrough: Unconventional Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction by Brian Kiteley. Here's the exercise:

"Write from the point of view of a person in a coma. This is a permanent condition. The patient will probably never come out of the coma, but still haltingly comprehends the outer world. The voices of loved ones are familiar, even intimately familiar, but the comatose character cannot attach names to the voices. The patient has lost this capacity. 500 words."

"This is an exercise about death-in-life. The person who is telling the story is technically alive and is obviously narrating the tale for us -- to us -- but people in the room with him do not really know if the comatose person is alive or dead. This is also simply an exercise in sensory deprivation, like Plato's cave -- shadows thrown against the wall of a character's consciousness. The people in this piece will be barely human -- they'll be words, perhaps an odor, may be a dim memory evoked."

I have to admit, I find this a strange exercise. Yes, playing with exercising different senses makes sense to me (pun unintentional) but trying to force a story from the point of view of a person in a coma? And they're not going to recover, they don't recognize the voices they hear, why would I as a reader be interested in this? It seems like a purely literary exercise, and if you let yourself really think about being in that condition, I suspect it will be a very frustrating exercise, also. A character who cannot react or act, trying to understand the shadows impinging on them? I suppose you could draw a parallel with a baby, who also was faced with a blooming, buzzing confusion -- but at least the baby gets to grow up and start making sense out of it all. The character viewpoint here apparently doesn't have an opportunity to change.

Personally, I would prefer that you take some other limited sensory conditions. You might consider my friend who was profoundly colorblind, and enjoyed wearing lumberjack style flannel shirts -- bright bold plaids. I asked him, and he said everything was marked with a code, and he had asked trusted friends and family to tell him what went with what. Or perhaps the viewpoint of a dog, or maybe that cat? Feel free to pick your own.

In any case, write.