Narrative Setup and Psychic Distance

Five examples of how I used my favourite writing tools of all in my new novel The Bruegel Boy

In decades of teaching and mentoring, I’ve seen how thinking in terms of psychic distance can help just about every writer make the most of their narrative and their prose. But the broad applicability of the concept can make it hard to work out how it applies to your project, and how best to use it, because it will always depend on your narrative setup.

What is ‘narrative setup’?

I’m not sure there’s a generally agreed label for this aspect of storytelling, though we need one. Meanwhile, I’ve coined ‘narrative setup’ to group together big choices about the way your story is going to be told: the how, if you like, when the plot and characters are the what, and the themes and pleasures the why.

I promise I’ll post about it soon: meanwhile this set of questions to ask your story should help, and the TLDR version goes something like:

1. Who is telling this story? And how much do you want the reader aware of this entity who is producing the words with which the story will be told?

2. Why are they telling it? What ideas/themes/emotions/desires/pleasures shape what gets told and how?

3. Where do they stand in time and space, relative to the events and settings they’re narrating? Are we permanently trapped in the thick of it, or is there also a further-out, wider vantage point from which we can observe and understand?

4. Which characters’ heads can they get inside? This is about point-of-view.

5. Which characters’ voices do they allow to colour their storytelling? This is about characterisation and prose.

What is psychic distance?

If you’re unfamiliar with the idea of psychic distance, this is my main Tool-kit post about it. That teases apart the main concepts with specific demonstrations, and this post has real-world examples of some fantastic writers using it.

If you’re already familiar with it all, then you’ll have spotted that those questions move from where and who the narrator is, towards how they and the characters’ viewpoints and voices interact. In other words, your available choices about psychic distance are partly the result of how you set up your narrative: your basic plan for the Why, and therefore the How, of the narrative.

So, since my own writing is the only writing about which I can say definitive things about what I was trying to do, I though I would unpack what’s going on in The Bruegel Boy.

Narrative Setup in The Bruegel Boy

A summary of the overall premise does sound rather bald, and anyone who’s thinking about writing blurbs (= AmEng cover copy), hooks and pitches might want to pop over to my website, and compare this summary to that blurb. But here goes:

In old age, Gillis Vervloet wants to enter the monastery of Sint Bartolomëus in the Saarland, so he can end his days in peace. The Abbot decrees that first he must provide an account of his youth, when he was caught up in the political and religious turmoil of the Low Countries in the 1570s, to prove that he is not, himself, a heretic or a revolutionary. The Abbot also requires that Gil use his experience and understanding of those events to discover the fate of the Abbey’s statue of St Michael, which vanished in the years when the abbey was given over to Protestantism. Only if Gil completes both tasks satisfactorily will he be considered for admission as a monk, and not handed over the Inquisition.

So The Bruegel Boy is made up of three strands. They are all locked to Gil’s point-of-view because a) I felt incapable of inhabiting the viewpoint of a genius visual artist like Bruegel, and b) as this was largely a growing-up story, I wanted the reader to feel Gil’s limited understanding from the inside, as it enlarges but therefore becomes more puzzling, complex and difficult.

1. Old Gil’s account of his past for the abbot, in past tense and first person, is what I think of as a ‘document’, a self-standing element. It’s set in a different san-serif font, and separated off with elegant ornamental dividers.

2. The ‘present moment’ of the narrative, in present tense and third person. Old Gil, accompanied by rigid, scrupulous novice Brother Petrus, sets out to find the statue, is injured, and then snowed up overnight in a mountain hut. Among other things, we learn that he is willing to swear before God that his account for the abbot is true in essence – though to God, and God alone, he’d admit it’s a little, well, hazy, in some of the details.

3. Young Gil’s life in the Low Countries, as remembered by Old Gil in past tense and third person: the story which, God knows already, is not so very different, and is stored in his aching body.

However, in terms of wordcount that’s pretty much in reverse order. I haven’t done the maths, but Gil’s account for the Abbot is probably only a few thousand words. Gil’s present in Altstadgott is perhaps a sixth of the whole, but it’s the spine of the novel, if you like, which holds together the longest, broadest arc of story: that of Young Gil.

Each of the interwoven strand proceeds in its own chronological order, and as we switch between strands, the different combinations of tense and person help to keep the reader straight.

So, to some examples:

1. Gil’s Account for the Abbot:

When I was fifteen my sister sickened, and as she lay dying asked me to vow on a holy book that I would enter the religious life as a monk, and be ordained priest. For all my grief for her, I made that vow most joyfully and, since Pater Goossens was away, did what any man may do to ease her passing: she died shriven.

But soon afterwards, as we fought to bring in the harvest before the weather broke, Joris was deceived by the woman he had taken into his bed into believing certain shameful slanders of me. I protested my innocence vehemently, but Weibe swore to my guilt, and my second brother Roeland brought no counter-evidence.

Joris being the head of our family, I had to obey his command that I leave the farm under an oath, made on the image of Our Lady, that I would go beyond the country in which the Vervloets of het Moeras were known, and never return, nor speak to any man of my origins.

Here, Gil is clearly the narrator: indeed, the opening of the entire novel is the opening of this narrative: You require, Father Abbot, that I, Gillis Vervloet, being in my eightieth year on this earth, tell my story… By the Grace of God, I obey. Phrases such as ‘for all my grief for her,’ and ‘Joris being the head of our family’ are very much at the far-out end of the psychic distance spectrum, explaining and contextualising of both physical/practical and psychological events.

But even though Old Gil is firmly in charge as the explicit narrator, and in terms of showing and telling, things are quite Tell-y, some more Show-y specifics bring the past alive a bit more: as we fought to bring in the harvest before the weather broke and the woman he had taken into his bed. (The latter is also a case of the strength of concrete language and the directness of historical phrases compared to our waffly office-speak: how much weaker ‘the woman he was having an affair with’ would have been!)

2. Young Gil’s Thread

Where we are wholly in the narrative of Young Gil in Antwerp and Brussels in the 1560s, it works pretty straightforwardly as ‘standard realist narrative’. This strand kicks off immediately after the previous extract, so I could trust the reader to get it without my spending any time contextualising.

Three days of walking and two very wet nights, and by the time Gil reached the bridge into Antwerp he was footsore and frightened – but the great gates were shut. Behind them, the bars were thudding into place.

‘A little bit of love for the night, young sire?’ called a man in the doorway of one of the shacks clustered on the riverbank. His girl grabbed for Gil’s sleeve. Gil tore his arm away and hobbled for the gatehouse.

There was still a line of light round the little wicket-door, and he put a hand to it.

‘Too late!’ a voice bellowed.

‘But please, I’ve nowhere to sleep out here.’

‘Only with a pass,’ the voice said. ‘Stand away now!’ As Gil snatched his hand away the light vanished and the bolts shot home.

The girl plucked at his sleeve, but gently this time. ‘If you don’t want me, sir, try Sint-Michaël’s Abbey. The White Canons. Ferry-oars down the wharf.’

The ferry cost his last stuiver, but the boatman dropped him at the southern corner of the city walls, and nodded him towards a cluster of tall buildings which looked both part and not part of the city. (p. 12)

In terms of Gardner’s psychic distance spectrum, this bit is all around the PD3 mark, though there’s plenty of PD4/Free Indirect Style elsewhere.

3. Old Gil’s Thread

The spine of this strand is also straightforward realist narrative. They’re going to be horribly late for Vespers:

[Brother Petrus] nods to where a track leads off the main valley road. ‘There’s a path up the cliff to the abbey’s postern gate. It’s very steep, but you – we – have brought it upon ourselves.’

Gil’s bad left leg doesn’t like the sound of any of that, but he doesn’t want to be in breach of the conditions of his liberty, and Brother Petrus is not the young man to forgive being got into trouble by an old, lame… What does he think Gil is? This tall, thin Här Vervloet whose Latin has the rasp and slush of the Low Countries, and who ought to have his sights set on Death, or at least a holy image, and not be hobbling about Neieportal town and then this side of the valley, asking so many questions?

So Gil lets him turn them aside along the track, twisting through pine trees and under cliff-faces to where the river swirls and pours between the rocks. There, a plank bridge has been thrown from one bank to the other, with a single handrail. Gil grips the handrail and hauls himself up; even as he steps forward he sees the glitter of frost, and recalls Brother Petrus’ mother speaking of an old Catholic man who was chased up the valley by the Protestant lads, and fell off that little bridge, and drowned—

—his right foot slips, the old damage to his left knee gives way so it crumples under him, and he’s falling sideways, catching on the grassy edge of the bank, tumbling into the icy, rocky shallows of the river.

Notice that not only do we get a bit closer in to Gil’s immediate thoughts, in Free Indirect Style, - Brother Petrus is not the young man to forgive being got into trouble - but then slide into Gil’s imagining of Petrus’ thoughts: This tall, thin Här Vervloet … who ought to have his sights set on Death, or at least a holy image…?

This is subtly different from how FIS works in Young Gil’s narrative where the narrative takes on only his voice and viewpoint, because he doesn’t yet have the capacity to think himself into other people’s heads. Old Gil does.

4. Old Gil’s wider awareness

The present moment of the narrative is the events of the night that follows Gil’s fall into the river, but of course that includes Gil’s wider experience of his current circumstances in the abbey. So the Old Gil strand includes some straightforward slips to- and fro between that present, and the immediate past after he first took shelter in the Abbey:

…a couple of brothers were snuffing the altar candles. But though the comfort of words that he knows as well as he knows the names of his own brothers was still wrapped round him, he was frightened, too. He’d hoped to get shelter by presenting himself as a Protestant with grief branded on his body and mind, but here in Neieportal the Roman Rite has been re-enthroned, like an Empress, after an interregnum never again to be mentioned. Would the door be shut in his face?

It has not been, quite.

Gil does, after all, also have the proof – albeit hastily certificated, only a month before, by a clerical hand which he knew was somewhat the worse for the drink at the wake – that he has been received again into the Mother Church. The abbot has neither the power to exclude him from the abbey church, nor the right to withhold the Sacrament of the Eucharist if Gil is in a state of grace and desires to receive it.

But as to Gil’s request not merely for shelter from the snow, but for admission to St Bartholomäus as a monk, that was – that is – another matter.

First, Gil must make a full account – a full account, Dom Baudouin said, glaring at Gil over his spectacles – of his life. ‘Understand, my son’ – Gil is at least thirty years his senior – ‘I must be able, with a clear conscience, to recommend that you be admitted to the Order.’ The unlikelihood of that happening seemed to strike him, which was when he set out what must be demonstrated by Gil’s account: the duress of those times, and his repentance ever since.

Notice how things like that was - that is - keep us conscious of Gil’s present. Some scraps of the past are made vivid, as with Dom Baudoin’s action in looking over his spectacles, while others are summarised: which was when he set out what must be demonstrated.

These kind of passages, where Gil’s present mind can naturally think and remember and slide around in the past, are also where I could do some necessary touching in of the rules and customs of the different forms that faith takes in this world.

By 1626, confessional divisions have hardened and institutionalised and we’re eight years in to the Thirty Years War, but back in the 1560s, confessional divisions were much more fluid and shifting.

5. Old Gil as the lens to see Young Gil:

The degree to which Old Gil is present as the lens/frame/filter in the Young Gil narrative was one of the things it took me longest to get right.

The interaction was crucial because the two strands are, at heart, the story of one man. Old Gil needs to remember his youth so as to help him survive in the present, but Young Gil’s story is also a bildungsroman: a journey from childhood to the adult who is Old Gil. And I was also working with the slipperiness of memory, and the way we all make different stories of the same event in our lives, depending on what we need and desire to get from that particular act of storytelling.

Psychic distance and point-of-view are intimately related, and Old Gil’s perspective on his young self provided me - which is to say the reader - with that perspective and broader understanding that Young Gil by definition doesn’t have.

The difficulty was that, as with all forms of filtering, if the reader’s kept too aware, too much of the time, of the frame through which the story’s being told, it can be distancing. Keeping the frame in the picture, as it were, risks slowing the pace and keeping the reader at a slight distance, emotionally speaking.¹ In psychic distance terms, if we’re too often reminded of the narrator’s perspective, we’re not often enough freed to immerse fully in the characters’ experience.

And yet for some of us readers and writers, that double-consciousness enriches our experience of a story so much that the risk is worth it. Different beta-readers, I found, had very different tolerances for how much they enjoyed or disliked feeling that double-consciousness, and getting the balance right took a lot of trial, error and sometimes even arguments.

For some time, the two formed essentially one narrative, the spine being Old Gil over that night, and his mind sliding back and forward to and from the past.

Eventually, I separated out the present-tense Old Gil story into substantial sections at the end of each act. In the Young Gil narrative, we are only occasionally reminded that the lens is a lens: that this all being told through Old Gil’s perspective and viewpoint, though not in his first person.

That perspective is mostly perceptible on the way in and out of Young Gil sections, and then as we go through the frame and settle into the scene, our sense of Old Gil falls away.

The memory’s like the scent inside a chest of linen laid carefully away many years ago, Gil thinks fondly now; so many years since the lavender and cedarwood had any life in them, and yet your mind still knows clearly what your nose cannot actually smell. He remembers, too, that Mayken was not, in strict fact, at the Hoboken Kermesse at all.

But needs must.

What he really could smell then was the church ale and trampled grass, the roasting piglet and grilling river-trout. Roeland had gone with them to the Hoboken fair but slipped forward towards the singing troupe that he might join in the tenor part of Salve, feste dies. By the time they reached ‘The Linden Tree’ he had become one of them, their arms round one anothers’ shoulders to lead next a raucous glee about a cow who sailed to market on a cheese – to the delight of the crowd, most of whom were on their third or fourth mug of ale – and followed it with a ballad in praise of the Prince of Oranje. Bruegel was, of course, sitting on the churchyard wall drawing them, while Gertruide had actually coaxed a smile out of Pater Paulus’s housekeeper Mevrouw Nagel; at her elbow Gil had just guessed the weight of the rabbit and set the weary creature back in its bag.

Then, before the cheers had died away, the leader, suddenly sober, began a ballad which sang of the knight Tristan and the Lady Iseult, and their love, and the wreck of their ship. By the tiny start the others gave before they joined in, Gil thought that this song had not been in the troupe’s plan, but the leader seemed to draw their voices together again: he had a face both dark and bright, and always moving – a face you couldn’t take your eyes off and didn’t want to. Even Gil could sense how their music held this half-drunk village crowd rapt.

Notice how even when we’re far-out with Old Gil in psychic distance terms, figurative language keeps things vivid and Show-y: like the scent inside a chest of linen laid carefully away… so many years since the lavender and cedarwood had any life.

On the other hand the double-consciousness is reinforced by a deliberate filtering - he remembers too - even though it’s hardly necessary in a paragraph which begins The memory’[i]s. The Tell-y tone is doing a similar job in Mayken was not, in strict fact, at the Hoboken Kermesse at all: reminding us that the link between past and present is what Gil remembers, and what he chooses to tell - which might be a bit different.

As with any non-linear narrative, the key to keeping the reader straight was to take a lot of care with the moves between the strands. Here, a handhold helps us move backwards in time- what he could really smell then - and, the move safely made, we leave the present moment behind: … the roasting piglet and grilling river-trout. Roeland had gone with them to the Hoboken fair.

But even though we’re closer into a specific scene of events, we’re still only in the middling levels of psychic distance: for all the specifics along the way, the story moves quite briskly onwards. It’s only as Gil (who is tone deaf and can’t hear music) watches the leader of the singing troupe, Olivier, that the narrative dips into free indirect style: he had a face both dark and bright, and always moving – a face you couldn’t take your eyes off and didn’t want to.

One more thought

All of these extracts are from fairly early in the novel, partly to avoid plot-spoilers, partly because they tend to need less contextualising, but also because in any novel the reader has to be helped to learn how the narrative works and so how to read it. That post suggest that the reader is open to just about any narrative setup and way of working for the first 3-5,000 words, but once they’ve absorbed it and settled in, they need to feel safe and confident and, as each element or switch comes along, freely go with it.

Helping the reader learn how a narrative works is even more crucial with a non-linear narrative built out of several interrelated strands (The Bruegel Boy also has also epigraphs from Cennini’s famous Il libro dell’arte) There’s a much greater risk of the reader getting lost, boggled and impatient than with a single-strand story moving chronologically, and so it needs extra conscious and deliberate work by the writer to make sure they don’t.

So I, and then my beta-readers and my editor, spent a lot of time making sure that within the first pages - the first twelve, in this case - the reader has met all these different elements, including how they interact, at least once.

This post can only give a flavour of how it works - and far be it from me to discourage you from buying the actual book or ordering it from the library, obviously! But I hope I’ve given you an idea of the possibilities and processes involved.

1. One of the things I’m particularly pleased about, in all the lovely reviews and endorsements for The Bruegel Boy, is how many of them say something about it being ‘immersive’. All my fretting and wrangling must have paid off!