psychic distance
Psychic distance (also called “narrative distance” or “emotional distance”) is a concept that John Gardner explores in his book The Art of Fiction. One way to think about psychic distance is: how far is the reader taken inside of the character's head? Or, where does the narrative/narrator stand in relation to the main character?
Psychic distance can be very removed (when we view the main character from afar) or very close (when we seem to be viewing the world from within the main character’s consciousness).
Here’s an example of how psychic distance can vary from very distant to very close:
“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.”
Notice how each level takes us closer and closer into the character’s perspective. At Level 1, it is like we are viewing the character from afar, but by Level 5, it’s as if we are inhabiting Henry’s body and thinking just like he does.
If you want to write a very intimate-feeling feeling perspective, you’ll want to decrease the psychic distance in your story. To do so, you can:
Ensure the reader stays firmly inside character’s perspective (i.e., we do not experience or think about things that the character wouldn’t be able to experience or think about).
Make sure your word choice matches your character’s style of speech/thought.
Have the sentence style and rhythm mimic that of the character’s way of speaking.
Here’s an example of decreased psychic distance from Iris Murdoch’s “A Fairly Honourable Defeat”:
Morgan pushed the earth away and rolled down the slope onto the level of the shorter grass. She lay there prone and struggled with giddiness and nausea and unconsciousness. She told herself, and hung desperately on to the thought, I have got sunstroke, that is what it is, it must be.
If you want to create a more distant-feeling narrative, here are some tricks to try:
Allow us to view the main character as if we are standing outside of him/her.
Use word choice that is different from the character’s natural style of thinking/speaking.
Use a style of narration that is more authorial and less in keeping with the character’s speech and thought patterns.
Here’s an example of increased psychic distance from John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio”:
Jim and Irene Wescott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theater on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester. Irene Wescott was pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair, and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written, and in the cold weather she wore a coat of fitch skins dyed to resemble mink.
Craft Exercise
Write one paragraph of a story at "Level 1" of psychic distance—i.e., very distant from your main character's perspective
For example, you might write something like: "A young woman sat waiting for the train. She was wearing a long dress that dragged on the ground, and the hem was ripped, although she didn’t seem to be aware of it.”
Then, write the same paragraph again, using "Level 5" of psychic distance.
E.g., "How long would it be until the train arrived? Andrea pulled the hem of her long dress off the station floor and examined the rip that had formed along the hem. Shit. Another dress ruined.”
Now, evaluate:
What level of distance feels more apt for the story you are telling? Do you need to adjust the psychic distance to suit the story’s needs (would Level 3, for example, be more appropriate than Level 1 or Level 5?)