Absurdism and absurdist fiction is deliciously bizarre. Featuring (unsurprisingly) deliberately absurd characters, situations, subjects and plots, absurdist works can take a while to get used to. Well-written, they are entertaining, thought-provoking and delightfully ambiguous. Badly written, readers often give up in disgust and confusion after a few pages.
Hallmarks of absurdist fiction
Unlike many other genres, absurdism is difficult to classify according to normal tropes of plot or stock characters. Absurdism focuses on people’s reaction to unusual and extreme situations, so one indication you’ve stumbled across some absurdist work is the spectacularly unpredictable happening. Because of the random, eccentric nature a lot of absrdist writers take, often the plot is buried deeply amongst a series of adventures, annotations, side-tracking and verbal meanderings. Readers of Douglas Adams and Tom Holt will be familiar with this.
Absurdism is often funny, but doesn’t have to be. The extreme and bizarre situations absurdist writers love can be found outside comic settings, but less often. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Camus’ The Stranger and Robbins’ Still Life with Woodpecker are not deliberately comical. Still, the vast majority of absurdist works have some element of humour in them, even if it is macabre like Catch-22.
Acquired taste
Absurdist fiction is definitely an acquired taste. Its unpredictable nature doesn’t endear it to casual readers. Plots often jump around with little or no warning. Authors who write absurdist fiction are often very demanding of their readers, and their books assume a wide and classical education in order to catch the more esoteric puns and references scattered about. Thomas Pynchon has a particular reputation for dense, difficult books. It’s not all scholarly-analysis, though. Absurdism can be fun! Watch some M*A*S*H. Wander over to The New Absurdist and check out their magazine and some of their short stories. If you like how it feels, here’s a short list of popular absurdist fiction:
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
- A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snickett
- The American Dream, by Edward Albee
- Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
- The Nose, by Nikolai Gogol
- The Stranger, by Albert Camus
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard
How to write absurdist fiction
It’s difficult to prescribe how to write absurdly. Following exercises in random generation can give you some good starting points. Remember that your aim is to put normal people in bizarre situations. Arthur Dent woke up, lay down in front of his house to stop it getting demolished, got handed a towel, had his planet destroyed, and then toured to the end of the Universe and back a few times.
Here’s a brief exercise that will guide you through creating deliberately absurd work.
Wander over to the Plotboiler and generate a random plot. Then insert a ‘normal’ character into the situation. Write for 500 words. No more. No less. Exactly 500.
Repeat the process of generating a new plot, but keep the protagonist. Jump as cleanly as you can into the new setting. Have characters from the first tail off or fade away as necessary, but keep what you can. Go for another 500 words, exactly. The writing will feel a bit awkward at this point.
Do the whole thing over one more time. Is it getting messy? Hard to do? That’s Ok. You’re nearly done, and by forcing yourself to stick with these awkwardly compiled jumble of foibles, caricatures, collective nouns and idiosyncracies you’re heading in the right direction.
At the end of the exercise, you’ll have a 1500 word mess. If you feel awkward, that’s perfectly normal. Getting the hang of writing absurdist fiction takes a lot of letting-go of your senses of control. If you’re exhausted, you can stop now. Go, revise, clean up as little. Keep the fundamental messiness there, but if a single element or two isn’t working, you have my permission to take them out.
Still enthusiastic? Great! Let’s extend the story a little. You can extend your total word count to 2000, as long as you do one of the following:
- Go to Wikipedia and click on the ‘Random Article’ generator. Assuming you don’t get a Japanese railway station, include the landing page in your story. Repeat three times.
- Randomly Stumble Upon a website in a category you know nothing about. Using only the information in that page, have a character go on a 300-350 word rant about the topic.
- Put 4-5 items from the List of Cool Things into your story.
That should give you enough room to smooth out the awkward kinks in your plot and develop a bit of character. Don’t be surprised if your story feels ungainly compared to something evolved naturally. Work through that feeling of discomfort. Your finished piece should be delightfully whimsical. If it’s not, a little eccentricity never hurt anyone.
Still hungry for more Absurdism? Check out these other resources:
Back to list of fiction genres
Allan Gullette has some more information on Absurdist writers
See who’s been writing Absurdly at Amazon
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