writingtipswithlee

[writingtipswithlee]

"Narrative distance"? Do tell!

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.

[writingtipswithlee]

write FIRST in arial, don't bother changing it, and every few thousand words change the font and read it back, just to make sure you're not missing stuff. when your eyes get used to reading the same font all the time you skip over mistakes. switch it up. get funky (but not comic sans funky. never comic sans funky.)

wait are there writers who draft in times new roman

are you guys ok

[writingtipswithlee]

allow yourself to write

allow yourself to write please

please allow yourself to write

i find myself sitting in front of a blank page and i'm scared that none of my words will ever be good enough to fit onto it

i find myself sitting in front of a screen and i'm scared the keyboard will swallow my words and take them away

but when you start writing and just let it happen, good things happen simeltaneously!

and yes. your writing might be shit.

but it's writing, and it's yours, and you've got a first draft of something pure and authentic and raw and you and thats all because you simply allowed yourself to write.

some people say 'rome wasn't built in a day' and that's a great saying and all but someone had an idea for a prosperous civilisation and that started with a rough draft (this is a made up tidbit but it seems fairly likely.)

so yes. allow yourself to write and allow yourself to write BADLY! bad writing is so much fun!!!!! (if you're recognising that your writing is bad it means you know it could be better and that means you can reach into the depths of your brain and work out what makes it bad and figure out what you need to learn to improve.)

allow yourself to write so that you may learn so that you may improve so that you may feel more comfortable allowing yourself to write.

thank u and goodnight.

[writingtipswithlee]

so you’re telling me that for this wip to be done I actually have to write? I have to write words? like real words with letters and everything?

[writingtipswithlee]

so i do not live in america but i still was like 'oh yeah 50,000 words in a month sounds great' and i started a week late and i was like 'oh i'll catch up' and then i started studying for exams like 'this is fine' and now i am at 12k, unmotivated and disappointed in my nanowrimo efforts :(

[writingtipswithlee]

things for characters to do while talking

so uh i am struggling at the moment to make my dialogue and thinking less static, but i had a little think and came up with some little things you can do to add some spice to those static blocks of writing we all inevitably find ourselves with!!

1) admire the person they're talking about. doesn't have to be romantically, it can be something like 'as she talked, they watched her eyes, animated and sparkling in the sunlight. They'd never seen eyes quite like those, the colour you get when you mix spring and the coldest layers of snow together, the type of piercing blue that often made people weak in the knees. Tearing their attention away, they replied...'

2) do a mundane activity. i could make a whole other list about these. things like grocery shopping, sharpening a knife, rearranging books or clothes, cleaning something... because chances are your character is going to need to slam a book shut or drop a can of beans at some point in the dialogue :)

3) reminisce. does something about the speaker make them connect with their past? bring back a long forgotten memory? this is great for bringing in sensory things- 'something he said brought a flicker to my mind. it smelt of acrid smoke and fear, and i could almost hear the screams-'

4) plotting and planning. a little word triggers a whole new thought for your character, and they go aha! a new scheme to make {plot thing} happen! so handy when you need your character to have a stupid and/or genius idea.

5) do something new. i love this one because it can be so so so descriptively rich and animated, with sparse(r) dialogue and more imagery, bringing in every sense and engaging the reader with the story. 'I zoned out whatever they were saying, marvelling at the scene around me... somehow it felt like happiness, like a promise that everything would be okay, like the smell of baking bread would fold me into a warm hug and never let anything hurt me.'

6) imagine. let your character's mind wander, thinking about something relevant plot-wise, maybe, i don't know, killing dragons with a spoon or riding the moon on an epic journey.

7) this one could fit in with the 'mundane things,' but interacting with animals is super fun to write. Is your character allergic? do they sneeze/cough/scratch their arm after every line of dialogue? are they constantly distracted by the thought that the animals could be perceptive enough to think about them? so so so many options

8) DANCING. this could also go under mundane things but AAAAAAA CHARACTERS DANCING WHILE TALKING TO EACH OTHER is one of my FAVOURITE THINGS. I wrote like 4 paragraphs and its just two characters dancing and talking and it makes me feel so so so so so happy.

9) trying to fulfill some creative process. tap into the way you feel when someone tries to interupt you while you're reading/writing/drawing. so annoying. how would your character react? this is a fun one for giving insight into character and thinking about the way they'd handle dif situations.

10) little things. kicking at stones/dirt, picking at their fingernails, brushing their fingers through their [description here] hair, flicking a bug off their hand, wiping dirt from their face. teeny tiny things make your characters realistic.

I hope this helps! feel free to reblog and add more :)