Narrative Distance Is Your Friend

Write Better Now

As you know, we’ve been talking a lot about showing rather than telling in your stories and Shaun? Shaun is getting sick of it, so I may have to move on super soon.

But before I do (or we do), I wanted to talk about narrative distance. It’s a really important tool when you’re thinking about telling writing and showing writing.

Louise Harnby defines narrative distance as:

“Narrative distance’ describes the space between a novel’s narrator and the reader.

• “If we, as readers, feel deeply connected to the narrator and their experience of the fictional world they inhabit, narrative distance is tiny.

• “If we feel dislocated from them, more like we’re looking out on the story’s landscape objectively, the narrative distance is wide.”

Or as The History Quill explains:

“When narrative distance is at its greatest, the story is in a distant narration mode. As readers, we’re watching from afar, surveying characters and events with an objective and impersonal eye – think of it as the equivalent of a wide shot in a movie.

“Then, as the distance narrows slightly, a character comes into view. At this stage, all we can know about the character is what we can intuit from external clues (like physical appearance, expressions, dialogue and actions). As the narrative distance shrinks further, we begin to get glimpses of the character’s subjective experience (their thoughts and feelings).

“As the narrative distance is reduced even further, we enter close character mode. The reader is inhabiting the character’s consciousness: seeing through their eyes, thinking their thoughts, feeling what they feel in real time.”

There are different levels of narrative distance. You can zoom in and zoom out, but when you get into YOU ARE TELLING TOO MUCH territory is when you stay far away for a long, long time.

Here is an example of distance levels starting from far away to close.

The time was seven o’clock. A woman sat at her desk typing.

Super far away. Totally impersonal.

Carrie Jones couldn’t feel her feet any longer. She’d been sitting at the desk for so long.

We have a couple details about this character now.

Carrie wanted to kill her desk. No, her computer.

Carrie is just Carrie now. She is feeling some things, but we’re not quite feeling them with her.

Why the freaking frig did she become a writer and a journalist and an editor?

Here, we’re starting to feel Carrie, right? Cough. Feel her voice? We feel like the narration is more her own voice.

Computers. Desks. Chairs. All freaking stifling, all freaking claustrophobic. But she had responsibilities, right? Has to sit there, butt in chair, to get it down because who else would?

Oh, no! Carrie is having issues and we feel it, too, right? Suddenly, we might be a bit worried about Carrie’s anger or her mental health.

That last one is a close narrative distance. We are in her head, hearing her voice.

We can even put all of that together to see the different elements and the smooth-ish transition from far to close. Sometimes a lack of a smooth transition makes clunky writing.

The time was seven o’clock and a woman sat at her desk typing. Carrie Jones couldn’t feel her feet any longer. She’d been sitting at the desk for so long. Carrie wanted to kill her desk. No, her computer. Why the freaking frig did she become a writer and a journalist and an editor?

Computers. Desks. Chairs. All freaking stifling, all freaking claustrophobic. But she had responsibilities, right? Has to sit there, butt in chair, to get it down because who else would?

Different genres and point of views have different reader expectations. It’s hard to get away with a big narrative distance in a Princess Diary style book. When that happens in a first-person narrative, that far away distance feels like telling instead of showing.

Here, a quick example of when it doesn’t work in first person point-of-view (the I point-of-view).

It was seven o’clock and I sat at my desk typing. I couldn’t feel my feet. I’d been sitting at my desk so long. I wanted to kill my desk. Actually, I wanted to kill my computer. Why had I become a writer? A journalist? An editor. All the tools of the trade required sitting. I have responsibilities. I have to sit there and work because I didn’t know if anyone else could take up the financial slack.

So, it feels . . . stilted? Whiny? I don’t like the voice at all. What a pain in the butt, she is. But do you see how the narrative distance combined with the sentence structure makes this feel TOLD even though it’s in the first person. I’m not feeling it with her. I’m actually alienated from the voice.

A really amazing and detailed discussion about controlling narrative distance is at Kristen Chavez’s blog here. You should check it out because it has all sorts of brilliant bits in there.

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