#28. Alice in Wonderland Special! A Wonderland of Portals and Writing Adventures

Randomness is a strong theme in Alice; being in a strange place, a foreign country where you don’t know the rules, or where rules can be broken. A bit like the landscape of storytelling and, certainly, of Exquisite Corpse.
So as the Cheshire cat grins from its perch in the tree, daring you to listen on, let us step into the wonderful world of portals.

Then follow the white rabbit of your imagination into more story brainstorms with the surrealist word game of Exquisite Corpse.

Go forth and be inspired!

Hello imaginative people! I’m Anna Tizard and this is episode 28 of Brainstoryum. It’s also – at last! – the first in a mini-series of Alice in Wonderland themed shows. For the next six shows I’m going to be dipping into the weird world of Wonderland and seeing what writing tips and ideas we can draw from this iconic story that everyone seems to know… or do you, really? It’s going to be a little bit surreal, with a touch of the profound; but ultimately, I’ll be sharing practical ideas you can use for your writing and creativity.

But why Alice in Wonderland? It’s a story that’s close to my part-time surrealist heart. It has a relatable flavour of surrealism that’s fun and colourful; adventurous. An accessible kind of surreal, embracing nonsense without itself becoming nonsensical or difficult to read. My kind of weird.

Randomness is a strong theme in Alice; being in a strange place, a foreign country where you don’t know the rules; ‘true’ rules and rules to be broken. A bit like the landscape of storytelling; and certainly, of Exquisite Corpse.

So as the Cheshire Cat grins from its perch in the tree, daring you to listen on, let us step into the wonderful world of portals.
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If you enjoy fantasy fiction, the chances are you’ll love portals.

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice spends quite some time in a portal: the underground tunnel she falls through when she first follows the white rabbit. Even in the Disney cartoon, all these random objects float around her. She’s falling for so long, she has plenty of time to wonder where she is going, and in the book, she’s there so long she actually dozes off. As she does so, her mind reaches an in-between state, a dream-like state, and she starts to get muddled.

And I quote: “And here Alice began to get rather sleepy and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, “Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?” and sometimes, “Do bats eat cats?” for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, “Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?” when suddenly, thump! Thump! Down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.”

I realised, on re-reading the book, I’d forgotten that she’s described as falling asleep at the beginning, because in the Disney cartoon, you only see her wake up from a dream at the end. But having re-read this, where Lewis Carroll makes it clear from the beginning that she falls and falls asleep, I think it’s really significant that, to enter Wonderland fully, to arrive on the other side of reality, you have to give in completely. Let go of your conscious thoughts, give in to the unconscious.

This is so surreal! By definition, this line of thinking is at the heart of surrealism.

It’s also what we all do to some extent when we’re being creative. This letting go. Sometimes I think this is the main difference between art and craft in writing. The craft is your skillset, your grasp of the language, knowing what works best in a sentence, techniques that you’re always adding to and improving as you practise writing and as you read. But the art is the wild part, the part that’s not under your control.

As a discovery writer, this aspect is extra important to me, and I’m more aware of it, and interested in how to get into that zone more easily. Besides being a writer, I’m also a musician, I play mandolin (not just jingles on this show) I’m in a small, amateur band in my workplace, and again, I definitely feel this tension, when I play, between what I know how to do – my muscle memory of how to play – and that strange, slightly wobbly feeling of letting go; giving in to the music. For I believe we must all… fall a little… down the rabbit hole in order to truly find ourselves and find our art; which is not always ‘ourselves’ as we know ourselves to be. We are discovering something. We’re on a journey. We don’t know what’s coming next; not really. Life and all its unknowns are bigger than we are, more meaningful and expansive than our individual lives: and this is the profound aspect of art; the reason so many of us are drawn to it. Ordinary life doesn’t fully express what life is really all about. Artists and writers are typically seekers after meaning; but in order to truly seek, we must let go, and fall. And we will see strange things along the way.

Portals have great symbolic significance, for writers and readers. That special kind of concentration when we’re caught up in reading a book, or writing one, we partially shut off our minds from other distractions so we can suspend our disbelief and “be” in the other world we’re imagining.

We create – with our minds – a precious in-between space. It’s a bit like when we’re asleep or dreaming: you could ask, “where am I, really?” but then that might break the spell. Imagination requires us to give up this questioning, this daytime logic, just for a little while, so we can slip into the space between spaces.

If you picture for a moment the act of writing a story as going down an alleyway, with strange twists and turns. You go past various doors, some closed, some ajar. Some are clean, freshly painted, they have signs; others are broken and hanging off their hinges. These are like story choices, where you may choose to take your story idea or your character next. You can try any door, and you might have an idea of where it leads, but you can’t know, completely. One of the most magical things about writing – or playing music – is that when you start down a creative pathway, when you open one of these doors, you can’t really be sure where it’s going to take you; when you hang up your self-consciousness and just go for it.

Going back to the time it takes for Alice to fall through the rabbit hole: I’ve been reading an incredible book by John Truby called The Anatomy of Genres; in it, he recommends creating a lengthy portal experience. He says this is one of the reasons why Alice’s fall is so iconic. Rather than holding up a story or making readers impatient to get to the other world, he says we should extend the experience of going through a portal, make it more interesting and difficult to pass through, because readers love portals, and these scenes often end up as the most memorable. Think about Lucy going through the wardrobe into Narnia. It works for her, then when she shows her incredulous siblings, it stops working; later, it finally works for all of them – and I feel like there’s an element of giving in, where they have to suspend their disbelief to trigger the magic; to stop questioning, because being too logical, and too consciously aware of what’s going on, chases away magic, the way too much critical thinking can chase away inspiration.

So if you like a good portal, why not invent one of your own – and make more of it? Develop it. Get really creative with it. Make it difficult for your characters to get through; have them spend more time in that weird, in-between space. Explore the mystery of what it means to let go; to fall; to slip through this world into that other place, where anything is possible.

On that note, I think it’s time to enter the portal of our imagination and play some rounds of Exquisite Corpse. Bring forth the socks of destiny!

​Listen to the show to hear the story brainstorms - see link at the top of this page.
(Magic is not transposable!)