Okay, so I was working on my story when I hit a giant wall. Oh yes, the ideas were there but I realized that I couldn't write it well. So I decided to suck up my pride and ask you for ideas. You see, I was planning on making Harry a little bit crazy, not too much and I've already done some of it, and I think it worked out rather well.

This is an example I did from Ch. 29 during Voldemort's rebirth.

"It wasn’t fair, everything was going so well. He had stopped Quirrell, oh yes he had, and there was a song,and a swish and then the teachers was nothing but the diary, and Ginny, and the ink that wasn’t really ink, but blood and there was a ghost girl in a bathroom, and proof of legends. And the forgetting, which wasn’t good, but it all worked out again, because later on, he became whole again."

Yes, it rambles, but it was only for a few paragraphs. I experimented a little bit with the structure, and bold font so it looks different visually. But there's no way I would write like that for 20,000 words. And while I am going around most of the problem by writing my version of book five through other people's perspective's I realized I don't know what I'm going to do about Harry.

So the question: How does one portray insanity for a several thousand words without it being a spectacular failure?
That's an issue I've read in several Luna fics, some people focus far to much on her words with nargles and wrackspurts that they don't have the spirit of the character right. Although there are some fics I have read that work, the search I've done for a few days have wielded little results that make me happy.
And I have several crazy people in my story so I was hoping to give all of them a different style, although that can be easily tossed if it doesn't work.

Any suggestions?

 

Need moar context to actually have any real go at it.

But from what I can tell, you need to let the randomness flow from sentence to sentence, idea to idea, and not half-way in between, because it makes your paragraph above, look like it was written in illiteracy.

I think you really do need to keep a normal flow, while relying on tangent-like sentences for the greatest effect... but it would be too easy to do too much.
Mess up the dialog (internal too), sure, but leave the sentence structure and flow of the story the fuck alone. What ever did it do to you anyway?

 

I think I agree with that ^ You've got several levels of crazy, right? There's the 'slightly crazy' where you say strange things sometimes, and your thoughts sort of wander. Then there's the uber crazy in which sentences are totally disjointed, and the inner monologue starts and stops, a bit like what you've got there.

I think if you want to maintain the crazy but not drive your audience insane (hah) then you might want to stick with proper sentence structure, especially in the narration. It's fine to go from one thought to the next in a stream of consciousness sort of thing, but don't chop them up. Leave that for the dialogue. Nutty is good; incoherence is bad.

 

The best way to convey the character's insanity would be describing the full extent of their expressions. For example:

Luna twirled the wand in her thin, pale fingers, whistling softly. She looked up at him, as if she had just noticed that he was there, and blinked at him confusedly. "Where did they go, Harry? I'm so lonely."

Harry looked at her then, and her golden hair gleamed in the moonlight. Her face was as pale as a ghost, and her eyes were round; she looked at him accusingly and poked him in his chest with the wand.

"Why did you take them away?" she said, the wandtip lighting up, bathing her in a glow that lit her features. "Bring them back!"

/end

My point is: the dialogue isn't what makes the characters--it's the description. I'd work on that if you want to make Luna, or any other character, distinctive and interesting enough to read.

 

Don't make the words illogical. Just warp the logic.

 

I'm intrigued by the insane harry along with luna idea though. It could make for an interesting fic.

I dunno..

Luna brings Harry a note from Dumbledore, to attend another "Tom lesson" (during HBP/AU), during one of his Occulmancy lessons with Snape. Murphey's law ensues when occulmancy/legillimancy goes horribly wrong:-
Luna-styleCrazy!Harry + Bonded!Luna. Harry/Luna pairing that takes the wizarding world by the short and curlies and shakes the Blubbering Humdingers out of it until nargles fall out.
edit: throw in Tonks as a catalyst and have 3 very insane metamorphs on the loose....
kk i'll go crawl back under my rock now.

It's a bunny that could go either way: From Epic win to Epic fail.
are there any Occulmancy gone wrong challenges out there?
/googles.

 

General advice about insanity:

This is a quote I am paraphrasing, will get the right one later.

Don't use an insane person to describe insane things. Either use an insane person to tell about normal things, or use a normal person to tell about insane things.

If you write from Luna's first person perspective describing Insane!Harry then you are using someone apparently absentminded who definitely is random in her speech to tell us about an insane character. That will be for both you as a writer and us as readers a headache.

So first, like others said, give context. Adopt an omniscient pov so that you can give proper environment in which we can enjoy Luna's randomness/absetmindedness and Harry's insanity. If you still want to show what is going on in their heads do little blurbs separated by (***) or some other device which lets us know that POV is about to switch. That way you can get your 200-500 words of insane!Harry or oddball!Luna's different thought processes shown. The rest of the time you the narrator can tell us the story.

Hope that helps.

I write a couple of insane characters with varying degrees of success so I know it is rough.

 

Yeah, I sort of realized what a horrible mistake it was for Luna to describe Harry when I was writing the chapter. On the other hand, it is such a delicious opportunity I can't avoid it, but I am taking my sweet time in writing it.
I admit, I never was fond of Luna's character, the words on the page never clicked in my head until I saw her portrayal in the fifth movie. I think her logic is extremely sensible although a bit disjointed, so I might not have too much trouble. But I have four characters in the story that could be considered insane, five if you include Voldemort. Writing them all the same would sort of defeat the idea of their unconventional logic.

Trying to make put them all in a different spectrum of logic while maintaining coherency has fried my brain. I'm afraid my sentences will start to sound like this:

Harry was walking up the stairs, and found a tuna fish sandwich, and took a bite of it, only to discover it was actually his Herbology textbook that he buried under the Whomping Willow because he heard it was good luck.

That is to say, writing crazy because it's different and not because it has any purpose to the plot.