Itchy Bitesized 29: Six Thoughts about Psychic Distance

Getting to grips with this key writer's tool.

If you’ve been digging around on This Itch of Writing for any length of time, or attended any workshop or event that I’m involved in, you’ll have met the idea of psychic distance. It comes from John Gardner’s founding text, The Art of Fiction, and it promptly became a central element of my writing and teaching. That was years ago, so I thought a round-up would be timely.

1. Other terms I’ve met for this idea are emotional distance, narrative depth, perspective and narrative distance, although each emphasises one aspect of this set of ideas, slightly at the cost of other aspects. Then a graduate of the Self-Editing Your Novel Course put a different, entirely brilliantly gloss on the term:

   In French they have an even better expression than depth: relief, which are the contours of the landscape. When a writer gives more relief, he/she is building up the mountains, digging out valleys and working on the slopes between.

2. The main Itch posts on psychic distance:

   1. What psychic distance is and how to use it : this does (I hope!) what it says on the tin.

   2. How terrific writers actually use it : some real-world examples.

   3. Not just long-shot but wide-angle, not just close-up but narrow-beam : why ‘far-out’ is just as useful as ‘close-in’.

   4. Psychic distance is key to one way of successfully moving point-of-view (and there are lots more ways here.)

   5. Working with Showing and Telling - particularly if you swap in my preferred terms Evoking and Informing - is closely allied to working with psychic distance.

   6. ‘From Long Shots to X-Rays’: an article by the always-excellent David Jauss which doesn’t namecheck Gardner, but is about just this topic.

      

3. Getting to grips with this tool (as with any tool) may best be done separately from your work-in-progress, so you aren’t constrained by what fits that. Try taking two or three sentences from something you’ve written, and re-writing them at each of Gardner’s five levels. Some tips:

   1. it’s easiest if you start from the middle levels and work out.

   2. for the far-out levels you may need to add information and sacrifice evocation, and vice versa a closer-in levels. That’s fine.

   3. when you’ve done that, see if you can push the extremes further out still.

   4. when you’ve done that, try a ‘slide’, either from long-shot to close-in, or the other way.

   5. don’t worry that it doesn’t look like ‘good writing’, any more than if your twisting a lump of clay into different shapes doesn’t come out looking like art: what matters is that you’ve got to know how the clay behaves when you work it.

   6. don’t worry if you can’t label what you’re doing with Gardner’s numbers. We need them to talk about the spectrum in the first place, but none of it is nailable-down to ‘Is this 2¾ or 3½?’, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s all very -ish, in other words.

   7. remember that though many narratives will spend much of their time in a certain part of the spectrum, the distance is rarely exactly the same for any length of time, which is one of the things which brings dynamism to your storytelling. (Similarly, when Showing and Telling co-operate it makes the narrative more dynamic).

4. Watch what you’re reading in terms of psychic distance, to help train your eye for it. At any point (particularly if the writing is being super-effective, or is falling notably flat) stop and ask yourself:

   1. Roughly how far-out or far-in are we here?

   2. What words and phrases are making it feel like that distance?

   3. What is the effect on how I’m experiencing the story?

   4. Why might the writer have intuitively or consciously made that choice?

   5. If we were further out, or further in, how would that affect the storytelling?

   6. How widely does does the narrative range to and fro along the spectrum?

   This isn’t necessarily about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ - it may just be different. But getting used to playing with the possibilities is a super-useful form of writerly yoga.

5. In revising and editing, get into the habit of checking whether a different distance might be more effective. And if you’ve ever used the Itch post The Fiction-Editor’s Pharmacopoeia to diagnose symptoms and treat a disease in your own or someone else’s writing, you’ll know how often less-successful choices about psychic distance are involved.

6. Psychic distance applies to memoir, life writing and creative non-fiction too: essentially, to any narrative that draws the reader into inhabiting another point-of-view. My go-to explanation of the whole idea, indeed, is to imagine an old person narrating a story of their childhood: when do they keep the reader with them, showing us the child through the narrator’s mature eyes, and when do they let their older perspective fade out and the child’s point-of-view and perhaps voice take over the narrative?

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Image credit: Jose Martin Ramirez Carrasco on Unsplash.