21.34: Knowing the Distance

Understanding narrative distance in writing

0:00This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash writingexcuses. Season 21, episode 34.

0:19This is Writing Excuses. Knowing the distance. Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Dong Wong. I'm Aaron. And I'm Howard. And I want to talk about the physical, metaphysical distance between the thing that you are writing, the setting that you've created, the work that you're making, and the context, the environment

0:50of your reader. The best example, leaps to mind for me, is if you've grown up on the coasts, if you know that your readers have grown up on the coasts, then you can freely drop the terms wharf, pier, jetty, key, dock, and they will know what you're talking about immediately. You don't need to define it. You don't need to describe it. But most people, myself included, actually have to go to a dictionary to find out what those

1:22mean. And so understanding the distance between your reader's understanding of this world and your understanding of this world is key to writing it correctly. There's a lot of different things to be thinking about with this distance issue. So one of the things that you're essentially talking about is the question of whether you're writing for an inside audience or an outside audience. Um, this is something we run into a lot in science fiction and fantasy because, uh, we're dealing

1:57with invented worlds, but it's also a matter of thinking about who your audience is. And for me, I, because I've got this background in puppet theater, there's the difference between my audience, which was children, and the people who had to buy the show, which was adults. So I had to, I had to be thinking about that. It has to play for this group, but it has to be accessible to this other group. At the same time, there's also this other use of the word distance, which is, um, which

2:32is part of how you're controlling this distance between the, the reader and the, the, the story, which is the narrator's distance from the story. Sometimes you're narrating from an omniscient point of view. Sometimes you are creating a deliberate distancing. Sometimes it's tight third. And I think it's, it's basically getting into, you know, the why of it is, well, what story are you trying to tell? And for whom is a lot of what we're talking about here.

Sensory details and modern storytelling trends

3:02Some of the tools that I use when I'm doing that are thinking about the difference between, um, uh, filtering words. If I want to create more distance, I'm going to use more filtering words. If I want to tighten the distance, I use less filtering words. That's, that's an easy one. But then when you're dealing with the outsider insider, it's also the, when am I going to define something and how? Well, I love, uh, looking at distance in this way, in terms of our senses, generally speaking,

3:37I can see it before I can hear it. I can hear it before I can smell it. I can smell it before I can touch it. And I can touch it before I can taste it. And so the closer I want the, the reader to feel they are to the setting, the closer senses I use, uh, if a character can smell something that to my mind draws the reader much closer to what's happening than if they happen to see something or hear something.

4:10One general note I want to make at a meta level is as a literary trend or storytelling trend, really over the past, I don't know, decades at this point, we've seen a real collapsing of distance. Distance, we, in general, the default storytelling mode is much closer in than it was, you know, mid-century, early 20th century, right? And, you know, there's a lot of theories as to why some people say it's social media, some say it's the way movies and video games are. But since, like, 70s realism rose in cinema, we've seen just, like, increasingly shorter

4:44and shorter distance narratively from where the perspective of the narrator is to where the experience of the character is. This is the rise of, like, first-person perspective in so many novels to the extent that sometimes there'll even be pushback on third person. There was, I think we're moving out of that moment a little bit, but for a second, there was, like, a lot of pushback if you did third person, especially if it was third person present tense, there was, like, you would get real friction in reader feedback. And it was very interesting to sort of see that collapse happen. And you can still play with it, but just something to keep in mind that there's a real expectation

5:19now of being very close to this perspective and experience of the characters. Yeah. And I think that two things, one, you made me start thinking about tense, which is interesting because I've heard people say that, you know, present tense is more distancing because you know you're not doing, like, as the present tense character is, like, saying, like, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, you yourself, the reader, know that you are not. And so it's different than the way that a lot of us tell stories to each other, which is in the past.

5:49And so, like, it makes you more conscious of the fact that you are reading a story. And so therefore, oddly, creates more distance despite it feeling in the moment of the story like it's more present, which is just, like, mind-blowing to me. But also, I've been trying to make a box in my head. And in that box, it's sort of thinking about outsider and insider and then close and far. And I wonder if part of the reason that we are seeing more, like, less distance between, you know, we're right on top of the narrator is because we are open to more outsider perspectives

6:23in our fiction. And when someone is telling you their story, you don't feel like you need it to be your story. Like, if you're telling me your experience of doing writing excuses as a podcast, I'm not going to disagree with you because it's your story. But in a much more, like, if you're doing third-person omniscient, you're telling me how everyone is feeling in the moment, which can feel alienating if you're not part of the group or you don't share that perspective as a reader.

Choosing distance and abstraction in fiction

6:50This raises a question that I'm going to pose to all of you. How do you decide?

6:59I mean, I believe that it's better to consciously decide than to just, you know, accidentally have done it. Although the vast majority of the things I've created, I have accidentally done stuff. Instinct matters. Gut feeling matters, right? How do you decide the distance that you want to have, the distance that you want to place between the reader and the narrative, between the narrator and the setting, between the characters and the environment?

7:29How do you make that decision? It's interesting because, you know, for me, this decision happens at game system level, right? Because it's layers of abstraction, right? Something like Dungeons and Dragons is modeling very, in a very detailed way, how it's like a physics engine for the world. Here's how things move through space. Here's how characters move through space. Here's how they interact with each other. Versus something like Blades in the Dark, which is very abstracted, where you're making cinematic moves. The dice roll represents a series of things that's, here's how this fight went. And you can describe a set of things versus, I swing my sword once, I swing it a second

8:04time, I swing it a third time, right? So there's different layers of abstraction there. And there are genre implications in that as well. Not necessarily in terms of fantasy science fiction, but in terms of, are we doing something really cinematic and, you know, broad in that way and abstract in that way? Or are we doing something that's like very in the details, nitty gritty, where we really want to think about the mechanics of this world, right? And those are two different, slightly different genre questions in terms of how much abstraction are we using?

8:34And in games, that is sort of that close farness. I think that with that, there's kind of also the question of, do you want the reader to think about this or do you want them to feel it? And often we want them to do both. Um, I will sometimes use this kind of distancing as a tool within a story that is not particularly distanced. If a character is going through shock or something like that. Um, there's a novel that just came out, um, when you are listening to this, as we are recording

9:09it, it is not out yet. Uh, but when it will have come out in June, it's called Sublimation by, uh, Isabel Kim. And it's fascinating because, um, she is creating deliberate distance in three different ways. Uh, the first is that parts of the story are told in second person and it is, the premise is that when you cross a boundary, um, a border, uh, that you, uh, you instance that there is a person who stays behind and a person who goes and that these are actual physical people.

9:43Um, and, and so then you can reintegrate later. And so she uses you, uh, she has two different UPOVs for the different halves of this person who later integrates. And, and it is a deliberate distance because she is thinking about this is how this other me did, did things. Yeah, I want to have read this book now. This is, it's a fantastic book. But then when they integrate, we switch to third person and it's a different kind of distancing

10:14and disorientation because there's an, there's a, an immediacy to it, but it's always the, uh, Rose did this, So Jung did this. It's, it's this back and forth between which half of this reintegrated person did this thing, which you could only do by going into this third. It's not omniscient, but it's, it's showing that the, the contrast. And then there's this third distancing thing, which is that in the middle, like there will be a scene and then in the middle of the scene, we suddenly go to this kind of academic text

10:47about like how instancing happens in Odysseus because it's in this version of our world. It's always happened. It is just a fascinating, really good use of how you can create this narrative distance contrasted with places where we get very close to the characters. It's phenomenal. You should all get it. This book sounds so cool. I have been dying to read it ever since I heard about it. As we record this, I will say, I have not finished it. I'm about halfway through and I have been wanting, I have been recommending it to everyone,

11:19like basically since chapter two. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then I'm going to come back and quote Mel Brooks.

11:28I love fried chicken and I thought I was pretty good at making it, but sometimes it just didn't come out right. I couldn't figure out what was going wrong. The solution was a thermometer. It sounds obvious, I know, but starting the frying at the correct temperature is not the secret. The secret is understanding how the oil changes temperature when the chicken goes into it and how long it takes to come back up. More chicken, the more shocked the oil is and the longer it'll take to reheat. And you can't really see that without a thermometer. And even then, you can't really use the thermometer's numbers until you know what they mean.

12:02Thomas Keller explained all that to me in Cooking Techniques 2, Meats, Stocks, and Sauces, Episode 5, exclusively available on Masterclass. There were a dozen different things in there I didn't know but needed to, but the big one was what the numbers mean and why they're so important to the home chef. See, in a commercial kitchen, the massive fryer pots don't get shocked much, and there are fancy computer controls keeping the oil in the right temperature range. At home, well, you have to ride your little fryer with a steady hand and a weather eye on

12:34the thermometer. That class elevated my fried chicken game. I learned something simple and obvious that I just hadn't been able to figure out on my own. That's what Masterclass is best at, delivering the information you didn't think you needed, but whose absence has been holding you back. There are over 200 classes across 13 major categories, and you can fit them into just about any schedule. Thomas Keller explained the fried chicken thermometer to me while I was on a road trip. Every new membership comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, and plans start at just $10 per

13:07month, billed annually. Masterclass keeps adding new classes, so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash excuses. That's 15% off at masterclass.com slash excuses. Head to masterclass.com slash excuses to see the latest offer. Mileage may vary, but in my home, Masterclass has paid for itself in homemade fried chicken

Humor, horror, and killable bodies

13:36alone.

Humor, horror, and killable bodies

13:37Mel Brooks, and boy, I sure hope I've got the quote right, famously said that humor is you falling into an open manhole. Tragedy is I have a hangnail. I love this in this context because it talks directly to proximity to the events. It's easier for me to laugh at it if it is distant, even if it's a disaster. It's easier for me to be pained by it if it is close to me, and that's one of the tools

14:11that I think I unconsciously use when I am shifting between humor and horror in some of the darker things that I've written. I think that using familiarity can really be one of the ways that you can bring a reader in close. There's a thing that Jackie Chan does when he's, you know, someone gets thrown through a plate glass window. None of us know what that feels like, but he can make it understandable by then having the

14:41character stumble back and hit their head on the shelf, which we all understand. So often when you've got this insider versus outsider, one of the ways that you can invite people closer in is including things in there that are things that probably everyone has experienced mixed in with all of the things that are unusual and unfamiliar. Well, you can use distance in that way for such impact as well, right? So if you think about like a Marvel movie, there's an incredible amount of violence happening on the screen of all different types versus a horror movie, which is usually one person

15:15experiencing violence rather than hundreds of people experiencing violence. But because you're so close into it and this thing of familiarity, you're using that tool of familiarity where often they're being attacked with household objects rather than a laser gun that doesn't exist in reality, right? Even if that laser gun incinerates 50 people, it's not as impactful as one man with a hammer, right? And I think you see that visceral intensity comes from familiarity. And when you get close to the subject, because you want that feeling to be relatable to you, it's why home invasion fiction works.

15:48It's why like certain types of horror are so unsettling to us. Yeah, I think like getting back to what you're trying to accomplish with distance makes me think about the concept of killable bodies, which is the idea that like in large war scenes and large like fantasy fight scenes, there's often a group of people who are basically considered to be like, you know, no one cares if you like got rid of the entire, the red shirts, like you got rid of, you blew up the entire ship, whatever. Like, oh, well, like, I mean, it's sad, but nobody really stops to like think about those

16:22people. And there's like a trope among like GMs in TTRPGs that like after your party goes and like kills the horde of whatever's, you know, you find the sad like art from the kid of like the head goblin that's like, daddy, have a great day at work, which makes it feel like that like all of a sudden narrows that distance. It's actually a horrible trick because you as the GM set your characters up to do the

16:52murder and then made them feel bad about the murder. And by horrible, you mean useful. Like, it's like, I hope you feel bad about the thing I told you to do, which is an interesting thing. But I think that talks about how there are reasons for distance. Maybe you're not telling a story in which you want to pause and think about how bad it is for the people on the USS Redshirt that they blew up. You know, you really want to talk about the broader war that's happening or how it's affecting the characters on the ship that you are writing.

17:22And in those moments, zooming out allows you to kind of tell the kind of distanced, more thinky version of the story, the strategy of war or conflict, as opposed to the impact, the emotional part. Well, there's a great example of, you know, of classic fantasy fiction that plays with scale at this in this way and plays with distance in this way, which is the Lord of the Rings, where you have two sides of the story. One is grand epic battles where thousands of people are dying on screen constantly.

17:53And then the other side of the story is two people walking through the wilderness for a long time, having an incredibly bad time of it. And I think one, the story of Frodo and Sam and Smeagol is so close into this tight interpersonal drama. And then the other is all the broad sweeping things that are happening that add weight to their individual journey, right? And so the relative distances in these two stories of here is Aragorn, you know, the heir to the throne versus here's these two simple people that are incredibly relatable to our own lives

18:30and experiences trying to do a thing that is in a story that's too big for them, right? And using the contrast of that scale, I think Tolkien ends up sort of inventing an entire genre of fiction in that friction there, right? In that space there. Gandalf between the two groups saying, all right, well, we got to do this big thing. I hope Frodo's having a nice hike. Yeah. Yeah. And what we're talking about here, I think as we're talking, I'm like, ah, this is just in many ways, another way to control reader focus.

19:00Yes. And also it's another way to control pace. Yep. Weird that it's all about focus and pace. Weird. Yeah. Where do I want you to look and how long do I want you to look at it? Is that all structure is? Yeah. Yeah.

Tools for shifting perspective and homework

19:13So in the last... Season over.

19:17Well, okay. I'll just send us to homework. Okay, no, in the last couple of minutes before we go to homework, what are some tricks in your toolbox for changing the distance quickly? I think... I mean, we may have already covered all of them. I mean, tense and perspective are some of the easiest ones, right? And, you know, the Isabel Kim is doing such interesting things with it, as you're describing it, of moving deliberately from POV, you know, in terms of first person, second person, third person, you know, we saw this in the fifth season as well.

19:49The way Nora Jemisin, N.K. Jemisin plays with that, the narrator perspective, I think, really shifts closeness and far. And when you suddenly realize the narration is much closer than you thought it was, it's a really startling shift, right? And you can... I totally lost my train of thought. I'm sorry. But you can... I was following you and I was on board that train. And it's still rolling.

20:21Because the thing that they're doing is they are creating a sense of immediacy by having the character interact. Like, it's the thing that Howard was talking about, about the senses, that when you don't realize who that narrator is in the fifth season, it's because they are not interacting with the scene. They are reporting on stuff. There is a distance there. And as soon as they interact with the scene directly, that's when everything snaps in very

20:51close. So, when people talk about this character feels very distant, a lot of times it's because there's no physical sensations. Sometimes it is because we don't have any interiority. We don't know what they're thinking. We don't know where they're feeling it in their body, which means we don't know what they're planning, which means we are separated from them. Sometimes it's because they aren't taking any actions. They are static. And so, there's this distance.

21:22And sometimes they just, in one of the failure modes, they are all over the map. They aren't focused on anything in particular. And so, I think if you're thinking about those kind of sort of four areas that, you know, what are we focusing on? What actions are we taking? I always go back to this thing that Aaron said, I think, last season about identity as a verb. You know, how are we interacting there? Or what sensations, you know, what are the thoughts? Those are the things, I think, that can really bring you in close.

21:55Well, one example that comes to mind as you're talking about that, in terms of the difference between, you know, being close in with sensation and things like that versus, you know, more out in the world. I'm thinking of severance, right? Where the Audis are experiencing the entire world. They have their whole life history. They have all this context. And then you get that transition moment of that incredible dolly zoom into that has this like crushing, collapsing effect where now you're in the innies perspective of the world, which they don't know anything. All they have is the immediacy of their experience in this inside life, right?

22:28And so you're so much closer to the innies characters than you are the outer characters, which is why in a lot of ways, their emotional journey is the core of the show, even though we are also deeply invested in what's going on outside. But the experience of the innies is really the heart of it. And we sort of see it at the end of the last season in really exciting ways. And what you talked about with the dolly shot, which I have never seen one second of severance, but sounds awesome. It's an incredible show. You have to watch it. I'm sorry. All right. That's what I'm doing. Bye, guys. No, but before I go, the dolly shot, the thing that I like about it is that I think

23:02tracking an object and tracking physical space is a great way to bridge distance. And I think it's because, Howard, of something you said, which is that like how sight, I can't remember how far out that was. Is that the furthest out or the... See here. Yeah. So seeing is like one of the furthest things. We can see the furthest. And so a lot of times you'll see like an object, an arrow fly, the bouncing basketball, you see the whole basketball game like in a movie, and then you follow the basketball as it rolls against one particular person's shoe. Yeah. And now you're in that person's perspective.

23:34And in terms of books, actually, one of the ones that I think about is like the earlier books in Wheel of Time, because Wheel of Time starts every book with like, the wheel turns and like, I'm sure this is not what actually happens, a tumbleweed like tumbles across the world and it tumbles past this guy and it tumbles past that guy. And they usually, there's these small scenes that are meant to show how the larger stakes of the entire world impact people we will only see for this one scene who are just like trying to take their wheat to the next town as the world falls apart around them.

24:06And I love that because it uses an object as a way to connect us. So anything you can use physically is a great way to do it. In the course of this discussion, I realized something that probably should have been just incredibly obvious. The reason that we have all the songs and all the food in Rivendell is so that we can get in close to The Lord of the Rings because it's a really big story.

24:37I have homework. I have homework for you. Y'all, this is going to be fun. Um, we talked a little bit about, uh, about, you know, Marvel movies, about action scenes. Um, I want you to write an action scene that feels like an action scene where the heroes are violently dispatching their enemies. And now I want you to rewrite it with a perspective shift and a distance shift so it is a horror scene

25:09about the enemies of our heroes being so miserably dispatched. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

25:24Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dong Wan Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr, Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com.