Explain it in text? Without emphatic arm gestures or wine? Oh god. Okay. I’ll try.
All right, so narrative distance is all about the proximity between you the reader and the POV character in a story you’re reading. You might sometimes also hear it called “psychic distance.” It puts you right up close to that character or pulls you away, and the narrative distance an author chooses greatly affects how their story turns out, because it can drastically change the focus.
Here’s an illustration of narrative distance from far to close, from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (a book I yelled at a lot, because Gardner is a pretentious bastard, but he does say very smart things about craft):
- It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
- Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
- Henry hated snowstorms.
- God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
- Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul
It feels a bit like zooming in with a camera, doesn’t it?
I always hate making decisions about narrative distance, because I usually get it wrong on the first try and have to fix it in revision. When I was writing Lost Causes, the first thing I had to do in revision was go through and zoom in a little on the narrative distance, because it felt like it was sitting right on top of Bruce’s prickly skin and it needed to be underneath where the little biting comments and intrusive thoughts lived.
Narrative distance is probably the simplest form of distance in POV, and there is where if I had two glasses of wine in me you would hit a vein of pure yelling. There are SO MANY forms of distance in POV. There’s the distance between the intended reader and the POV character, the distance between the POV character and the narrator (even if it’s 1st person!), the distance between the narrator and the author. There’s emotional distance, intellectual distance, psychological distance, experiential distance. If you look closely at a 3rd person POV story, you can tell things about the narrator as a person (and the narrator is an entity independent of the author) – like, for starters, you can tell if they’re sympathetic to the POV character by how they talk about their actions. Word choice and sentence structure can tell you a narrator’s level of education and where they’re from; you can sometimes even tell a narrator’s gender, class, and other less obvious identifying factors if you look closely enough. To find these details, ask: What does the narrator (or POV character, or author) understand?
I can’t put a name on the narrator of the Harry Potter books, but I can tell you he understands British culture intimately, what it’s like to be a teen boy with a crush, to not have money, to be lonely and abused, and to find and connect with people. There’s a lot he doesn’t understand (he doesn’t pick out little flags of queerness like I do, so he’s probably straight, for example), but he sympathizes with Harry and supports him. I like that narrator. I’m supposed to sympathize with him, and I do.
POV is made up of these little distances – countless small questions of proximity that, when stacked together, decide whether we’re going to root for or against a character, or whether we’ll put down a book 20 pages in, or whether a story will punch you in just the right place at just the right amount to make you bawl your eyes out.
There are so many different possible configurations of distance in this arena that there are literally infinite POVs. Fiction is magical and also intimidating as fuck.
LET’S TALK ABOUT NARRATIVE CONVENTIONS AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER AND EVER
Fascinating.
THIS, OMG. This is one of those things that I almost never think about when I’m writing. It’s one of the things I’ve always done on instinct, and while, on the one hand, it’s good to have a solid set of instincts when writing, on the other hand, when you start paying attention to things you previously did on instinct, you get a whole new set of tools that open up.
Narrative distance is one of my favorite things. In that I like to eliminate it. ^_^ My favorite fiction is the stuff that puts you THERE, in the character’s body, feeling what they feel and understanding what they understand and feeling their emotions rattle through you.
Ivyblossom’s talked a few times about narrative distance and how, essentially, she doesn’t believe in it. She writes in first person in the style that she does because she wants the reader to BE the character, and anything less allows the reader to take (what is to her) one fatal step back.
I’m not sure that I’d go quite that far, personally, but I find it a very interesting philosophy for fiction writing! It made me think about the disjunction between writing in a style whose goal is to minimize narrative distance and writing in third person, where the POV character is, by definition, a different person. Haven’t figured out what I make of that yet, but hopefully when I eventually do, it’ll be informative.
I wouldn’t swear a blood oath on this, but my sense is that the preference for a lack of narrative distance is a relatively recent phenomenon (I’m talking the last hundred years or so). I think contemporary readers have been conditioned for a very close third person perspective/free indirect discourse — and, relatedly, I think, also for first person POV — to the point that omniscient third feels kinda strange to us, even antiquated, and we are sometimes even rather suspicious of too much narrative distance. Jaimy Gordon has a fantastic article about this regarding the first person called “The Great I” (which, sadly, doesn’t seem to be online, but if anyone wants a PDF, I can hook you up).
As prettyarbitrary says, a close third can give you so much intimacy, both psychologically and physically, with a character, but there’s also tons a more omniscient/distant third person narrator can do for you. I also tend to fall into a closer third or a first person, but I think that default impulse is worth questioning.
You’re half-right, likecastle! The extremely close third person limited is more a modern taste, but 1st person has been used for that effect for centuries. The epistolary novel has been around since the 15th century, and Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in first person.
Omniscient third (e.g. The Odyssey) has, historically, been the thing—and I think you’re right about it striking us generally as antiquated now (though its close cousin, alternating 3rd person, is still in common use). In fact, my writing instructors actively coached us away from it, telling us scare stories about how it’s amateurish and reads as fake because obviously nobody can know what everybody’s thinking. That said, I always loved it when I was younger, and I have nothing against it. I’m just out of practice writing it, these days. (Lately, though, I’ve found I’m actually yearning for it a bit. I might give it a whirl with one of these things on my ‘to write’ list.)
In fact, in fanfiction I’ve come across some stories written in 3rd omniscient, and the writer tends to get criticized by others for ‘sloppy perspective.’ Since it’s not always clear whether the person MEANT to write in 3rd omniscient, sometimes this is a fair criticism, but the sheer assumption that nobody should write like that is elitist. (Actually I’m reading americanjedi’s ‘Wee Doctor’ series now, which is 3rd person omniscient! Though it focuses on John, the transition into other peoples’ perspectives is seamless when it happens.)
Weirdly, as hungry as modern audiences are for close 3rd person, I see a LOT of backlash against 1st person these days. Many readers seem to assume it’s simply impossible to ‘write it well.’ Even though I bet that if they wrote up a full list of all the things they’ve read, they’d find a fair amount of 1st person on that list. When it’s done well, 1st person has an odd way of fading into the background—maybe because it feels like somebody telling you a story rather than you reading it. I can’t even remember how many books I’ve gone to reread and been startled to find they were in 1st person.