Do you narrate your stories like a distant god looking down on the scene or as if you’re right behind the protagonist’s eyeballs watching events unfold? This is the question of narrative distance, something that’s really important in writing but also often goes unremarked upon. Well, have no fear, because this week we’re remarking upon it quite a lot.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[opening song]Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Chris.
Oren: And I’m Oren.
Chris: In a year where the internet was controlled by large corporations, and where podcasting had become a professional venture with a large production budget, two podcasters simply continued their cash-strapped 13-year podcast, completely unaware that they were behind the times and no one listened to them anyway.
Oren: Yeah, but it turned out that actually the secret was to not care about things like production values. Who needs that? It was just… just two people chatting is the ultimate podcast form.
Chris: And then one day, one of those podcasters somehow got it into her head to discuss narrative distance, even though such a dry subject matter would drive away any remaining listeners.
Oren: I mean, I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t be riveted by the distance of which you narrate things. That’s how far away your viewpoint character is from things, right? Can we measure it in school busses? I love to do that.
Chris: This is one of the issues that comes with… sometimes with blogging, instead of writing a book, is when you have something like a huge piece of instructional material or, you know, if people are going through a college program or something, if there’s something that’s really important, but it’s just not sexy, you could be like, “Sit down, you’re going to listen to this part before we move on.” But when I write blog posts, I’m always looking at, “Okay, how is this useful to people and why do they need to know this?” And it has to be more obviously useful to people.
But narrative distance is just so important that I can’t actually cover any PoV-related topics without mentioning it. So what’s happened is that I’ve defined it in like, I swear, a dozen times in a dozen different articles, even though I don’t have an article that’s like, “Here’s the guide to narrative distance.”
Oren: Well, I did read “Breaking the Curse of Distant Perspective” for this podcast, ’cause I wasn’t really sure what narrative distance was. And I know that’s an older post of ours, but it’s still pretty relevant.
Chris: Yeah, I talk about it in a lot of stuff, but there’s no “Here’s just an overall guide to what narrative distance is.” So maybe I’ll do that sometime, but at this point it almost feels like I would be… it would be too redundant with all of the other PoV articles where I’m like, “Okay, before I can talk about this, I have to first explain narrative distance,” ’cause I really think the narrative distance makes a bigger difference to narration than things that people talk about all the time, like what the tense is or whether it’s first or third person.
And when I wrote my article, for instance, on first person, it just felt so silly to do that because it was just, “Okay, but what kind of first person?” Because I think that different first person narration has more differences than things in common.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And… but everybody, first person versus third person, or tense, because these are so obvious traits it’s led to everybody categorizing narration that way, when I just don’t think that’s actually the natural way to do that. So it just becomes very awkward where, you know, if I wrote a similar post on third person, it would be very similar to my post on third person, with some adjustments because narrative distance makes such a huge difference. Anyway, what is it and what isn’t it?
Oren: Before we can talk about this, you do have to explain narrative distance again.
Chris: I do have to once more explain what narrative distance is. Okay. But I also want to talk about what it isn’t, because…
Oren: Okay.
Chris: …there are some disagreements in this industry. Everybody has their different terms and their own definitions. So when I’m talking about narrative distance, I mean strictly where the narrative camera is, which… basically, the narrative camera just… I’ll go into it more later, but in short: Are you looking at the story from the perspective of a character? Is a character essentially narrating the story? Or are you kind of looking at the character from the outside?
And the camera can like move around like it would in film, right? It can start at bird’s eye view and then come closer and closer to the character and go inside the character’s head. So that’s kind of what it is. But I’ve seen other people sometimes kind of equate it with narration that has personality, or saying that personality is a factor in distance or alters distance. So that the more personality the narration has, the closer distance it has. I do not like this.
Oren: Nah!
Chris: The reason I don’t like this is because, when you look into how narration works, it’s just clearly a separate factor, right? Like if you add personality, that doesn’t automatically move that narrative camera closer, right?
Oren: Whose personality? Is it Terry Pratchett’s personality when he’s writing third person omniscient? Because I wouldn’t consider that close. Is it the first-person retelling’s personality, the personality of the character 20 years later when they’re retelling the story? Again, that doesn’t seem close to me. Right?
Chris: And I do think, even sometimes, even though more personality is supposed to be closer distance, I think sometimes what you’ll have is, as you zoom in with a camera, you can actually change to a certain extent who the narrator is. And in that in-between space, there may be less personality temporarily, for instance. So I just think that when we conflate two things, properties that are actually separate factors (even if they often appear together, right? because that can be why people conflate them), but let’s look at what’s possible and doable, what we can do with narration, not what just tends to happen by accident.
Oren: Can you tell me a little bit more about changing the narrator as you zoom in? I’m not really sure what that means.
Chris: Well, for instance, if you actually look closely at the narration of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams, but Terry Pratchett especially, what you’ll see is that he tends to start his scenes with a very bird’s eye view, and there’s clearly an omniscient narrator that is outside the character and has a separate personality. And then as the scene progresses, he’ll mention the protagonist of that scene, and he’ll start to factor in the protagonist’s thoughts, and then he’ll close in the distance until the protagonist is basically narrating, and then he’ll keep it that way until the end of the scene.
So the scene breaks and chapter breaks and all that are very useful for kind of resetting, because the dynamic that happens is that closer distance can be more restrictive, and so it can be harder to zoom out than zoom in, usually. And so, if you don’t stay in close very long, you can still zoom out, but once you hang out in close long enough (and there are advantages to close, and it’s the reason why Pratchett would do something like this), you know, it’s a lot easier to jump back when the scene ends, and kind of expectations are reset a little bit.
So let me describe exactly what the effects are in more detail, so we know what we’re talking about. The more distance would be like a bird’s eye view. For instance, when I was doing the intro to this podcast, and talking about, “Oh, in an age where the internet is controlled by corporations…” not even talking about a person there, I’m talking about the general time period. Or you could, you know, “Hey look, there’s some cool mountains,” right? So there’s a very bird’s eye view. And then you can place a character in the scene, but it can still feel like they’re far away and we don’t know how they feel. So we’re looking at a landscape and we see a character and a horse riding down the road.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And then it gets a little closer, where we start telling readers what the character’s thoughts and feelings are. But we’re not showing them; we’re just telling them, right? So this is how Pratchett would start. And often what we have is either character thoughts are just told, right? “He thought that was a bad idea.” We don’t have, “Hey, that’s a really bad idea” or something the character would think directly. Or we do have something in italics where the character’s like, Wow, that’s a bad idea, but it’s treated a lot like dialogue where it’s in italics, so it’s set off from the rest of the narration, and then it has to be attributed just like dialogue is attributed. Wow, he thought. That’s a really bad idea.
Oren: Yeah. Yeah. I see.
Chris: We can see a clear distinction between what is character thoughts and what is narration. Then, once we get in closer and we’re starting to actually look through the character’s eyes and we’re in close perspective, what happens then is their narration starts to reflect what they’re thinking and feeling. And we don’t need direct thoughts anymore because instead the whole narration is their thoughts and feelings. But it’s not dialogue; it’s just reflected in kind of the reality that the narrator is saying. You know, “Wow, this character had his whole plan and didn’t seem to realize it was a bad idea.” It’s kind of built into the narration.
Now, you can still do direct thoughts with italics in close narration. I’ve started doing it for effect sometimes. So: I had one story where it was in close perspective, but when the character was in a really urgent situation and was just like, “Run!” right? I would sometimes put in a direct thought because it’s just more kind of immediate feeling, especially since direct thoughts are always in first person present tense. ’cause they’re what the character’s thinking.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, if you put something in italics, it emphasizes it. And that’s why you should put everything in italics, ’cause all things should be emphasized.
Chris: So you can still use direct thoughts for effect, but generally you wouldn’t have tons of direct thoughts anymore, because you can just include lots of thoughts and feelings in a much more smooth and natural way, because direct thoughts, sometimes you want things to stand out, but often you don’t. And it’s going to limit how many thoughts and feelings you have if they have to be set off like that every time and if they’re always like yelling and calling attention right to those lines. So indirect thoughts allow for a lot more kind of like internal perspective from the character, right? And so now the character basically is the narrator and things are being told from their perspective.
And it’s similar to what I would call the Knowledge Factor and PoV, but it’s different. So the Knowledge Factor is just, we talk about this a lot, it’s how much does your narrator know? So: Omniscient, we talked about, the narrator is all-knowing, and generally omniscience requires a distant narrator because individual characters don’t usually know everything, ’cause that’s usually story-wrecking.
Oren: Usually. Every once in a while there are exceptions, but…
Chris: Right. There are very niche scenarios, but generally that is going to be Distant, and that’s like a storyteller persona/personality, not a character personality.
Oren: Yeah, you generally don’t want to reveal who the narrator is and then have the reader wondering, “How do they know all that? Who told them that?”
Chris: And then the other one that we have is Limited, which means that we know as much as a specific viewpoint character knows and no more. So, once you’re in close perspective, that’s almost always going to be Limited perspective, where you should not introduce things that the character wouldn’t know anymore. That’s very jarring. It’s going to be called head-hopping oftentimes, or a viewpoint break. But people do sometimes write in Limited Distant, which I often am very skeptical about, ’cause the whole purpose of getting Distant is to give yourself the freedom to include more information. Otherwise, you would just want a more intimate perspective.
So doing something where you’re not getting the intimate perspective, but also you don’t have freedom, eh… I mean, it can allow you to kind of blur the lines a little bit between whether the character and the omniscient narrator is narrating a little bit more, because as long as you don’t include information the character doesn’t know, it’s going to be less jarring, right? So it’s sometimes used for that.
But then the other one I call Future, which is when you have a character retelling their past. Sometimes they’re kind of like an omniscient narrator because they know the future, they have that additional knowledge, a little bit of an outside perspective from the actual character going through the story, but they’re not fully omniscient.
Oren: That style’s great because, technically speaking, you can pause the narrative any time you want and just ramble about whatever comes to mind.
Chris: It’s true, you can.
Oren: And because you can technically do it without breaking your viewpoint.
Chris: But should you?
Oren: You definitely should. Like, if you can do a thing, it necessarily follows that you must do that thing.
Chris: But yeah. Another pet peeve, another thing where people are wrong, is just the general… again, the conflating of two other concepts where people say that first person is Close Distant and third person is Distant.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. And, okay, there is a, granted, you know, a little bit of truth to this and that on average, first person is more likely to be Close Distant, particularly since omniscient narration is almost always going to be in third person. And I also think that in some cases, if you do nothing else but switch the pronoun from third to first and don’t change anything, it is possible that it can feel a little bit more intimate that way, but just some first-person narration is much more distant than some third-person narration. So there are different factors and I just don’t think we should conflate those things. I think when we do that, we kind of limit ourselves and we limit the possibilities and what our narration can be.
Oren: Right, and you end up with people with really distant first person, because they assume that switching the first person is how they make something close, and they don’t actually know what it is, and so they just end up writing this really zoomed-out first-person perspective.
Chris: Yeah, it’s been interesting because I’ve been drafting a story that is a first-person retelling, right, and has, like, Future. And to see like, “Okay, how much can I go into future knowledge without having to kind of transition?” Because what happens is the very useful thing about having an omniscient narrator or a first-person retelling narrator that has a little bit… isn’t quite the character, and therefore has a little more flexibility, is that anytime you want the reader to just know something, you can, without ado, just stop and tell them for the purpose of telling them, because you have an actual separate narrator that is intentionally telling the story, as opposed to the idea that your character is just experiencing things.
The unfolding events, narrative premise, as we call it, kind of requires a lot more natural… You should not try to do it 100% realism, okay? Don’t do that to yourself. But it’s still, you know, aiming for a little bit more seamless narration and a little bit more seamless way of introducing information. Whereas when you have a retelling narrator or a storyteller who’s telling the story, like an omniscient narrator generally is, they could just stop and be like, “Oh, I should introduce this character. Here’s what they look like. Here’s funny facts about them.”
A retelling narrator will also kind of skip to future tense, and I found that I can sort of have the future narrator drop exposition for about a paragraph, and then seamlessly switch back to the story. But if it’s more than a paragraph, I have to transition and be like, “Okay, so back to that day I was telling you about.” And that’s a little awkward, right? Because at that point we kind of lose track of, “Wait, are we still in generalized exposition about the world, or are we talking about this particular day now?”
Oren: Also, “What was happening before we went off on this little future knowledge tangent,” right? It’s been two paragraphs I’ve already forgotten.
Chris: I’ve already forgotten! Oh yeah. But as I was saying, it’s harder to move from Close narration to Distant than vice versa. And the reason is, when I was talking about that knowledge factors, that Limited versus Omniscient, it’s because everything a character knows in Limited is also known by an omniscient narrator. So that makes it very easy for Omniscient to move to Limited because there’s no information that’s not allowed. But it can be very jarring to move from Close to Distant because in Close you usually have a limited narrator, and therefore that narrator cannot just tell you things that that character would not know, which makes it more difficult to move back—not impossible, but more difficult to move back to Omniscient again.
Oren: Right, and it’s also just more likely to be confusing. Because, if you start introducing things that the character doesn’t know, and you’ve zoomed in, it’s like, “Wait, hang on. What? Is that something the character knows? How do they know that?” And that’s not usually the feeling you want to create in your reader. You don’t usually want them wondering if your narration is from the protagonist’s viewpoint or from the omniscient narrator’s viewpoint.
Chris: Yeah, I just get annoyed when the narration does not, because for instance, The Raven Scholar…
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: …that we both read recently. And I mean, I did like the fun omniscient narrator who was a raven, you know? sometimes. But at the same time, we can see that the narration isn’t really written like it’s Omniscient, but the storyteller wants to use that flexibility. So just the way that all the scenes are framed, and in what details we include and what we don’t include, is clearly following a character perspective. The whole story is framed in terms of the main character Neema, and feels Limited until suddenly we include information that Neema would not know, and that’s what’s jarring.
Oren: And the transitions are not well marked. I am always having trouble telling if the narration is something that Neema knows or if it’s something that the narrator is swapping in… or, heck, if it’s even something the narrator knows, ’cause sure the narrator is the Raven God, but I can’t even tell if the Raven God knows everything or not. Sometimes the Raven God has to go places to find out what’s happening there, which implies it doesn’t know everything. So then I’m wondering, “How does it know about this other thing that happened?” And it’s all just a mess. And this, personally, it really annoyed me when the narration would suddenly go from normal Neema thoughts and it would be like, “Oh, it was really important to win the tournament and, you know, find out who killed this lady,” suddenly it shifts to, “Did you forget about us? We are magnificent.” It’s like you are clearly not narrating most of this story. You talk like Yoda. It would be like if every once in a while it just zoomed out and Yoda was telling the story. That’s just not what he sounds like.
Chris: I have an article primer on omniscient narration where I actually cover pretty thoroughly how Distant Omniscient narration needs to be done so that it feels like an omniscient narrator, because if you don’t have that expectation, right? if you don’t make it clear, the reader can’t read your mind that this is supposed to be Distant narration. If it looks like Close narration, they’ll assume it’s Close narration, right? So you have to have narration that is clearly not coming from the character in order to maintain that omniscient flexibility, if that’s what you want. I have a post that kind of covers how to do that.
And then I’ve seen people, you know, complaining, “Oh, people just don’t like or don’t understand omniscient narration.” It’s like, well, that’s possible, but it also could be that you’re just not doing omniscient narration, right? Because at this point, most books are not in… you know, we’re moving closer and closer, is what’s happening. And I think that’s a good thing. I think Close is a better default. It’s more immersive. It makes emotions stronger, makes the story tenser. So I think Close is a better default. But I do think it means… it might mean that, when storytellers want to write in a very distant Omniscient, they almost don’t know how to do it anymore.
Oren: Also, a lot of previous stories that do use Omniscient might have been better in a different viewpoint. That’s the thing that’s always frustrating about these discussions, is that people will bring up like, “Oh, but in the olden days, the old masters did it.” And like, okay. But you think of that as being really good because you can’t imagine it any other way. That doesn’t necessarily mean that was actually the right choice for it.
Chris: Well, if you look at some of these old masterpieces, a lot of them are just like a bunch of summary and exposition don’t even have real scenes.
Oren: They’re actually not good!
Chris: Told entirely in summary! Look, we have advanced. Storytelling has actually advanced. We are actually better than we used to be.
Oren: Yeah. And I don’t expect them to be as good as modern stories. I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation. It’s just that people sometimes hold them up as a reason why they don’t have to follow best practices. And that’s when it gets frustrating. Although here’s one: we’re talking about narrative distances, right? And we’ve got fairly recognized terms like Omniscient and even Limited. But have you ever heard of Deep PoV?
Chris: So I have heard the term Deep PoV many times, and I’ve assumed it’s just a synonym for Close.
Oren: Yeah, you would think that, but no, it’s way sillier.
Chris: That would make sense. And people make sense, right?
Oren: No, they… yeah, they definitely do. Okay, this is funny. I found several blog posts that split the distances into: Omniscient, okay, we know what that means, “Close Limited,” which is like if that’s the only kind of Limited, why did you put Close in front of it? Just call it Limited. And “Close Limited” seems to be more or less what we mean by Close Limited, but also sometimes can mean Distant Limited. And then you have Deep PoV, which at first it sounds like it means Close Limited. As I read further into these blog posts, I find out it actually means nothing. Because they say things like, “To be Deep PoV, you remove dialogue tags and action tags.” Do you know what an action tag is, Chris?
Chris: I think that’s what I use for the statements that a character takes an action. It’s used as a replacement for a dialogue tag. That’s how I use that term, right? I don’t know if it’s the same way anybody else, but basically, if somebody says something, and then you say, “Such and such character smiled,” right? that’s not a dialogue tag, because they didn’t, you know, have… there’s no verb that indicates speech. It’s like an action, but it’s placed next to the dialogue line to indicate that that’s a character that spoke.
Oren: Right, so you would think that that would make sense, that it would be like another way of indicating dialogue. But no, it basically means removing verbs, because in these blog posts, in the sentence “He pulled off his hat,” “pulled” is the action tag. So to get into Deep PoV, you shouldn’t use verbs.
Chris: So wait, what would you say instead, though?
Oren: I don’t know! The blog post didn’t say!
Chris: You know, I had another situation where I was just talking about the conflation of personality with narrative distance and how I don’t think those should be considered the same thing, where I had a person very carefully put a whole scale of what she felt was Distant to Close. For most of them, she didn’t include any examples, and it’s really hard to evaluate without examples, and I just love me guessing what all of these like shades were supposed to be. I’ve had followers of us just be like, “Oh, you’re so great, ’cause you use examples.” And it’s like, yes, examples are very important. Why isn’t anybody else using examples? Why are we the only ones?
Oren: The posts I was reading, they had examples of not having dialogue tags. Now, I still think this is a misunderstanding. This isn’t really about how close your PoV is; it’s just that it’s good to vary how you indicate dialogue, right? You’re going to need a mix of dialogue tags like “said,” or using an action like “he smiled,” and then some dialogue. Or occasionally you don’t need either of those; it’s just obvious who’s talking based on context. But the idea that that represents a special kind of PoV is to my mind just very silly.
Chris: I don’t feel from your description that I even know what it… I mean, they must mean something, okay?
Oren: Yeah, maybe.
Chris: They must mean something.
Oren: And so they could use examples of, “Here’s an example where there aren’t dialogue tags.” I’m like, “Yeah, that is an example,” because you can tell who’s talking from context, but I don’t see how the PoV is any deeper. And then it’s like, “Also take out action tags.” Is there an example for that? No. Because that’s not a thing. Nobody writes that way. How would you even do that?
Chris: One thing that I do see is people talking about filter. Filter words or filter verbs. Which I would call, refer to as distancing words. So we’re generally in agreement here. Where basically, if you narrate internal actions that could otherwise be directly shown via the narration, right? it is distancing. If you say, “Oh, she wondered what it would be like to walk in the desert,” that’s distancing, because we’re telling that she’s wondering. We’re not putting in the narration, “She looked at the picture of the desert. What would it be like to, you know, feel the sand under her feet?” So that would be how you would do it in actual Close perspective. And if you use the word “wondered,” right? you’re now telling what she is thinking instead of showing it directly. And so it’s distancing.
And that’s true also for perception, for “saw” or “heard.” Because, again, you know, you wouldn’t say, “She saw the bird take off” in Close. You would just say, “The bird took off.”
Oren: That’s an action tag there, Chris. You can’t be saying “took.” You somehow have to communicate that the bird took off without using that verb, because that verb is distancing, I guess.
Chris: Yeah, so I’ve heard those elsewhere, you know, being referred to as filter verbs, because they provide a filter between the character and the audience, and that’s fine. I like to call them distancing verbs, ’cause they add distance, but I can understand this other term. Nothing wrong with it. I think that what Deep PoV is may still be a mystery. I think I would need to see somebody, “Here’s an excerpt of narration that’s Deep. Here I’ve changed it to make it not Deep,” or vice versa. I don’t know. Dialogue tags? What?
Oren: Dialogue tags? Don’t have ’em! What I figured out from looking at these few examples they did provide is basically what they were doing was they were just highlighting one portion of the text that happened to not have dialogue tags and saying, “There! There’s Deep PoV! and, like, how is that different from other parts of the text? Like, “Shut up. It is.”
Chris: Yeah. You know, the problem with this field is that most people who have expertise in it mostly know things in the subconscious part of their brain, what we call the gut. They have some sort of sense for what they think something is, but they have a lot of trouble explaining it, and usually their mental models for the thing that they know in their gut level is just very bad. Or bad from my perspective, since I care about mental models a lot. Things just sound really weird and they’re not able to explain anything clearly because they don’t understand it at that higher intellectual level. But I mean, you could do a lot with a gut-level understanding. It’s just they can see whether something works or not.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, you can write a book with that. It’s just hard to teach it to others.
Chris: It’s hard to teach it to other people, yeah. Or just build a foundational knowledge base and a coherent philosophy.
Oren: Right. Well, I’m glad that you let me talk about Deep PoV, because that was going to be my big contribution to this podcast. And now that that is out of the way, and you all know the stuff I had to read for this, we’re going to go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you would like to close distance with us, consider supporting us on Patreon. You can take a close look at our behind-the-scenes rambles and ask us for advice on Discord. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Chris, we have to be careful telling people they can take a close look at our behind. That’s just not a thing I think we should be advertising on here without a higher rating. But anyway, before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[closing song]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.