#31. Alice in Wonderland Special! Writing Extremes and Plot Experiments - A Mad Hatter’s Tea Party

Today is all about the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, the pinnacle of nonsense and mayhem in Wonderland.

After some deep-thinking insights, have fun with some fresh rounds of Exquisite Corpse word play for some seriously weird story ideas!
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It is time to enter the Wonderland of your imagination.

Hello imaginative people! I’m Anna Tizard and this is episode 31 of Brainstoryum, and it’s number 4 out of 6 in my Alice in Wonderland mini-series (which of course you can listen to in any order).

Today we’re looking at extremes, for that’s what the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party seems to be full of: mayhem and nonsense.

But what is the scene for, what does it “do” for Alice and for the story as a whole?

What can we as authors learn from one of the most ridiculous chapters in literature?
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Make yourself a cup of tea and I’ll tell you all about it.
 
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Ah, what could be more iconic in Alice in Wonderland than the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party?

This scene is the very the pinnacle of weirdness, fun and rudeness.

They offer her wine, but there’s only tea. They say there’s no room for her, she can’t sit down, when there’s plenty of room.

They don’t ask her who she is (like the caterpillar), nor do they offer her any help (like the Cheshire cat); they tell her she needs a hair cut.

What proceeds is possibly the most inexplicable and directionless conversation in the entire story, full of riddles that don’t have answers or that just meander off. It’s the verbal equivalent of being stuck inside a maze and realising you’ve taken a wrong turn, but the path just keeps going on and on. The hatter and the March hare are brusque and changeable, and the whole scene is very awkward and uncomfortable for Alice – you just don’t know what anyone’s going to say next.

It’s odd that, in my mind, this is one of the most vivid, memorable scenes, made even more fun by images from having watched the Disney animation. But when you read it with your editor’s hat on – for as writers we are all just as much editors, too – my goodness, what is the point of this chapter? Nothing really happens; nothing changes. This party, these characters, would seem to absolutely exemplify the so-called ‘madness’ which the Cheshire Cat warned Alice about. Dysfunctional, fragmented trains of thought that just peter off or take a sudden turn in a direction you weren’t expecting. Nothing they talk about gets resolved; and in terms of the plotline, you have to ask, why is this scene even there? It doesn’t appear to move the story forward. Alice gains nothing from it, besides a desire to move on.

Strange, that a scene should be technically almost useless, pointless, and yet who could imagine Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland without it?

Is there something we can learn from this as authors? Because on the surface of it, it goes against our intuition and some really vital techniques: when you’re editing, if you find a scene that doesn’t move the story forward, generally speaking, you should cut it.

It makes me think about the value in stepping outside of a draft in progress, and to do a experiment: pick the main elements of the story and ask yourself what would happen if you took them to their extremes – maybe even in spite of the direction of the plot. Tell yourself you won’t be putting this new scene in the final draft. Let yourself off the hook so you don’t have that critical voice in your ear, questioning what you’re doing right now.
This exercise will work best if you’re writing something a little longer than your average short story. To begin with, simply step back and identify the main themes. This alone can be a very useful exercise when you’re up to your neck in it and maybe not quite sure how well everything’s working. Can you easy state what the themes are? What the main threads of the story? What is the point, the overall purpose or underlying message of the tale? And can you, just as an experiment, take that to its absolute extremes?

Treat it as just pure fun. Write a list of all the different things that could happen, even if you know you’re not going to use them. Some of these new ideas may even clash with what you’ve already worked out will happen later. Just try this brainstorm to see where it takes you, in a completely different direction.

For Alice, she is lost, confused and in a place where no-one makes any sense. Now, how to take that to extremes? You have the mad hatter’s tea party. That’s what it does.

It’s a simple fact that in any story, especially in a longer piece like a novel or novella, in order to satisfy the reader, you must take things to the furthest possible extreme as perceived by the audience. There’s a famous saying by Anton Chekhov: “If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.”

But I say, as authors of longer fiction, this is only part of what we must do. In order to really satisfy a reader, you don’t just fulfil their expectations, you have to go beyond them. In the same way that it mustn’t be obvious from the start who the murderer is in a murder mystery, you have to take the story to an extreme that was in some way foreseeable, not completely out of the blue (and therefore unbelievable), but also unforeseen: there’s a twist, a surprise that they didn’t see coming but which fits. Otherwise, why would they bother reading the book, if they could predict exactly what was going to happen?

As a recent example of how this might work out in a shorter piece, where you don’t really have the narrative space in which you can do a really big twist, but where this can still happen on a small scale: my short story, The Great Taco, which I read out in episode 24. In the second paragraph, you find out that Selwyn’s friend, Ed the magician, is missing. Everything about the atmosphere tells you it’s not looking good for Ed. That’s a promise I had to fulfil. It would be a real let-down if I didn’t ensure something awful had happened to him, or at least someone in the story. Having set this up, the reader would feel confused and wrong-footed if everything turned out to be perfectly okay, unless I found a really spectacular way of twisting it. Either Ed’s died, or something else is horribly wrong. That’s the expectation I set up and therefore had to fulfil – but then, I can’t fulfil it in a really obvious way. Imagine that I just wrote about Selwyn breaking in to Ed’s home and finding him dead or unconscious; that’s not enough. A story has to give you something extra that you wouldn’t have imagined on your own. Something a little bit extreme.

When Selwyn lets himself into Ed’s back garden in the middle of the night, he witnesses something rather strange. Have a listen if you like, it’s episode 24 of Brainstoryum.

Going back to the exercise: brainstorming a story to its extremes. Like I said, you might not use any of the scenes you come up with, but you never know. It might spark off an idea of how to twist things just a little. You might, during your brainstorm, stumble across a detail that becomes memorable, and that could really flavour the rest of the story.

As writers we’re here to give people experiences they wouldn’t otherwise have, through the power of their own imaginations.

Why stop at ordinary? Why be predictable? Fulfil their expectations but then go one step further and show them something else.

An imagination-experiment with extremes could give you the kind of iconic scene or detail that the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party gave to Wonderland. You never know until you try.
 
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Right, now I’ve whet your appetite to try writing something a bit twisty, here’s another publishing opportunity. Duck Duck Mongoose magazine is open for submissions for short fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction and artwork. At the time of recording (June 23) the theme for their next issue is Notes. What types of notes matter to you? Are they musical notes, reminders to yourself, notes you used to pass in class, love notes left in your kitchen, or something else? I like this theme – it gives a prompt but it’s quite open to interpretation.
Duck Duck Mongoose will consider any type of short work but will not consider works focussed on geese.

If you’d like to know more go to duckduckmongoose.wordpress.com and check their submission guidelines. As always, read the ts and cs before you decide where you want to submit your work.

Now, before we move onto game play, I have a little personal news: I’m about to go on a short break to Oxford. I’ve only passed through Oxford very briefly before and it looks like a fascinating city full of history – and references to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, because that’s where Lewis Carroll lived and wrote the book. And there’s an Alice in Wonderland shop which apparently used to be a sweet shop where the real Alice, the inspiration for the book, used to go and buy sweets. So perhaps by next time I’ll have some additional knowledge to share about the book. We shall see! There’ll be some photos as well, I’m sure – if you’re interested, please subscribe to my email list at annatizard.com – just hit any one of the ‘subscribe’ buttons and then go to your inbox to ‘confirm’ (though it will probably land in spam initially). I expect I’ll send the newsletter about Oxford around early July.

Right! As the Hatter and the March Hare set down their teacups and throw us a stare, it is time for us to begin our own journey down the winding path of imagination.

Let’s see what story ideas wait for us in… the socks of destiny.

Listen to the story brainstorms at the link at the top of this page (magic is not transposable)!