Visualizing unfocusedness in a novel - The Writing Process

Silver Screen #1 · Jun 23rd, 2020 · 1 · ·

I've recently been thinking about how one could properly visualize the feeling of being unfocused. Not just through words, but through stylization.

The feeling of having a thick fog in your mind. The feeling of too many things happening at once. The feeling of trailing off on more and more irrelevant topics while the thing at hand fades into obscurity.

The first thing I thought of was just adding more and more sentences to the page, making them overlap until you can barely read them anymore, but then I had the idea of a Word Search Puzzle. To hide different words in there along with the key word to the topic at hand. And to represent the fog, the letters would start to blurt.

Imagine this:

The words "MISSION REPORT" are written in a random spot on the page. The next page has a few more unrelated words on it, in just as random places. MISSION REPORT is in another place entirely even. This keeps happening with every page. At some point, even random letters start to appear until you have a whole page filled with a seemingly random letter block.

You could then highlight each irrelevant word with a different font or such, before the whole letter block just keeps getting more and more blurred.

At this point, "MISSION REPORT" is completely lost and has has faded into obscurity.

Authors need to do more cool shit with their page layout.

Bad Dragon