The descent into madness is an arc in many character-driven stories where we as readers get to see how a character goes from a stable individual to someone who has essentially cracked and has lost their sanity or has turned to a much darker path. This is one of the most interesting character arcs you can write, because seeing how madness happens and how it impacts the character in the long-run is genuinely powerful. For today’s post, I’ll be teaching you how you can write a character that descends into madness and how to really sell the character’s change to your readers.
What is ‘Madness?’
The idea of madness has been around in literature for a long time, and it tends to have a broad meaning behind it. For the most part, madness encompasses mental states and can stretch into the ideas of disorders. Many characters who descend into madness experience paranoia, anxiety, depression, and potentially even something like psychosis.
One of the things that’s important to writing this idea of madness is to be mindful of what you’re writing. Researching the conditions and giving them space to be understood by readers is important. You don’t want to fall into stereotyping people who have anxiety or paranoid behaviors.
Establish the Character’s Original State
The first thing that you want to do when you go to write your character is to create the original state that they are in. To do this, you’ll need to develop them as a character in the first place. You’ll have to figure out their personality, their standard behaviors, their current mental state, as well as things like strengths and weaknesses.
This allows for the readers to see what the character begins the story as so that when the character falls into madness, the reader can compare and contrast the before and after of that character.
If you want to learn how to develop a good character, check out this post!
Creating the Triggering Events
A character that descends into madness typically went through some sort of circumstance or went through many situations that helped to lead them to this new state. The circumstances should be enough to essentially make a character go completely insane by the end of the story, or at least push them to become a wildly different person.
The triggering events are often things that are large in nature, such as trauma, intense loss, extreme stress, or some sort of manipulation (see Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars). These things tend to be exacerbated by internal problems or could stem solely from internal problems, such as unresolved guilt, genetic predisposition to mental illness, suppressed emotions, etc…
Showing readers these things throughout the early portions of the story significantly helps to sell the idea of the descent into madness. For example, in my WIP, The Blade of the Disgraced (title reveal, yay!), the main character Revenkar sort of descends into a slight madness when he is imprisoned and tortured over political conflicts. However, there were things that happened in his childhood that helped to propel him further into a sort of disturbed state.
It’s a Gradual Thing!
One thing that is important to keep in mind when you’re writing is that madness is not a sudden hit to a person. It takes time for a character to descend into madness–hence why it’s called a descent. There are ways you can showcase the descent into madness throughout the story before the final stroke of madness, so to speak.
Firstly, subtle signs are a great way to do this. Anxiety, insomnia, irritability, anger issues, etc… are things that most people would dismiss as being normal. However, showing these things escalating and becoming more embedded in the character will help show how they are slowly spiraling out of control. You can escalate these symptoms even further by throwing in paranoia, hallucinations, a warped perception of reality and the mind, or similar symptoms.
The gradual descent into madness should eventually lead to a breaking point where the character has essentially gone out of control. For example, Hamlet from the Shakespearean play descends into madness, grappling with grief, hallucinations and more. His descent into madness is probably the most famous one I can think of in literature.
Internal Conflict and External Conflict
An important thing that you need to do when it comes to writing a character that descends into madness is to showcase the internal conflict that the character is struggling with. If a character is slowly going insane, they are likely to feel torn apart inside their own mind.
The character doesn’t need to necessarily become paranoid or see things or hear voices in their head, but they may lose their sense of morality along the way. They can become cold and unforgiving, like Walter White from Breaking Bad, who goes from a quiet chemistry teacher to a violent drug lord.
External conflict is also important, as when the character begins to descend into madness, they will likely begin doing things that don’t align with their previous behavior. This is more likely to create conflict with others, and could impact the character’s personal relationships.
Furthermore, people will react differently to the main character if they have started falling into a spiral of madness. The main character may lash out often, hurting others around them without realizing it. This could isolate the main character, which can further make their madness worse.
Unreliable Narrator
Building an unreliable narrator is a complicated subject that I’ll probably make a post on its own for, but I’ll briefly go through it in this post for now. The unreliable narrator is essentially a character that views reality from their lens and we as readers take in reality from that lens, but it turns out that the reality we are seeing is warped, twisted, and inaccurate.
This is a great way to draw readers into the story, as they will begin to question the reality of what they are reading and they will also get to sort of experience the character’s madness as well. This is a perfect tool to use for immersion purposes.
The Breaking Point
The final descent into madness, which is what I call the breaking point, is essentially the moment when the old character dies and the character who has fully descended into madness is born. There will likely be no resolution for the character in that they will not regain their sanity. Additionally, the character may move on from this, fully embracing their new state or continuing to resist it further and further into madness.
I think that this point is one that you should focus a lot of energy on, as this is the moment that the story has been building up to. You want your readers to really feel the emotions and the pain with the character and you want your readers to feel everything as well. That’s why focusing on immersing the reader in a story like this is important.
Avoid Stereotyping
I said this earlier, but I’ll say it again just to really hone in on this point: You want to work to avoid stereotyping. If you’re writing about actual mental illnesses and you’re not just writing a general descent into madness, it’s important to do proper research and get multiple perspectives on how it is living with that mental illness.
A lot of people think that schizophrenia for example is just a crazy person seeing things, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s types of schizophrenia and forms of it and it can manifest very differently in different people. Ultimately, it’s good behavior to do research and understand what you’re writing about so you can convey that properly in your story.
This isn’t the same thing, but I have written a post on how to write a character with psychopathy before and I talk about how to conduct research for psychopathy, so you can take techniques from that post and apply it to your story.
Foreshadowing is a Helpful Tool
A great technique you can use when you’re writing your story is to use tools like foreshadowing to help hint at the character’s madness. Writing lines early in the story that hint to something happening later is a really cool thing you can do. The line you write may seem completely insignificant to a reader at first, but if they reread the story, they should be able to notice this line and connect it with later events. I personally LOVE doing this in my stories, it’s so much fun!
Writing a character that descends into madness can honestly make for a really interesting and engaging story, but you need to approach it carefully and with a lot of effort. It may require research depending on what you’re trying to portray and you need to make sure you are working on the pacing of the story, as jumping too quickly into the descent to madness could hinder your overall story’s quality.
Before you head on out, be sure to check out my series, The Fallen Age Saga, and don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter! This way, you can stay up to date on my new WIPs, works, posts, and more! I’ve also released a brand new cover for Malware, Book 1 of The Fallen Age Saga, and I’ll be launching a new paperback cover soon!