Psychic Distance
Dec. 9th, 2004 06:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
odd_buttonsThe following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Psychic Distance
Psychic distance is the degree of intimacy readers feel toward characters in the fiction. A story that starts
Distance is created by such techniques as establishing a cool and dispassionate narrative voice and summarizing much of the action, dialogue, and thoughts of the characters. The effect is often to diminish the importance and uniqueness of individual lives. It is as if the readers are somewhat God-like, looking down from above on the mortals with their troubles and foibles.
When writers are self-conscious about themselves as writers they often keep a great distance from their characters, sounding as if they were writing encyclopedia entries instead of stories. Their hesitancy about physical and psychological intimacy can be a barrier to vital fiction.
Conversely, a narration that makes readers hear the characters' heavy breathing and smell their emotional anguish diminishes distance. Readers feel to close to the characters that, for those magical moments, they become those characters.
See Immediacy, Narrator, Point of View.
Psychic Distance
Psychic distance is the degree of intimacy readers feel toward characters in the fiction. A story that starts
A young man and a young woman sat morosely under a green parasol. They seemed mutually peeved.has its readers looking at the characters from the outside, almost as if they were animals being observed in a human zoo. But if the story starts
Philip stared unhappily across the table. The honeymoon was not going well at all.readers are virtually inside the character.
Distance is created by such techniques as establishing a cool and dispassionate narrative voice and summarizing much of the action, dialogue, and thoughts of the characters. The effect is often to diminish the importance and uniqueness of individual lives. It is as if the readers are somewhat God-like, looking down from above on the mortals with their troubles and foibles.
When writers are self-conscious about themselves as writers they often keep a great distance from their characters, sounding as if they were writing encyclopedia entries instead of stories. Their hesitancy about physical and psychological intimacy can be a barrier to vital fiction.
Conversely, a narration that makes readers hear the characters' heavy breathing and smell their emotional anguish diminishes distance. Readers feel to close to the characters that, for those magical moments, they become those characters.
See Immediacy, Narrator, Point of View.