Psychic distance – is it telling or showing?

Psychic distance  – also known as narrative distance – is how close or removed a reader feels from your characters and the events of your story. It affects how emotionally invested a reader becomes and how much they care about what happens, especially to the narrator. 

As a writer, you can control narrative distance and achieve the right balance by incorporating both near and far narrative distance. But before attempting this it is vital to know exactly what you are doing. If you accidentally create too much narrative distance, you can leave a reader feeling disconnected from characters and less likely to read on. If you have too close distance too often, things can become confused.

Psychic  distance is part of understanding point of view. And that's a very complex technique in itself, which I've already written about extensively. If you still feel a bit wonky over how to use POV, or even what it really is, first check out this blogpost HERE and this blogpost HERE.

Within POV is the technique of creating a character's  internal monologue.  Usually, we only see the internal monologue of the narrator, whose POV we are in. To quote MasterClass;

 “

Getting inside the mind
of the narrator isn't easy

Internal monologue…is a literary device that allows the reader to observe the inner thoughts of characters in a narrative.” Internal monologue prevents the narrative becoming emotionless.  When internal monologue is used, the scene is described through the perspective and voice of the character, making it emotional and personal. This prevents the writing becoming expositional. In other words internal monologue veers towards being SHOW, rather than TELL.  Browne & King put it this way: “One of the signs that you are writing from an intimate point of view is that the line between your description and your interior monologue begins to blur. Readers move effortlessly from seeing the world through your character’s eyes to seeing the world through your character’s mind and back again.” 

Psychic distance is the gap the reader feels between themselves and the events in the story. It can range from feeling like you’re deep inside the protagonist’s mind, experiencing their experiences to a wider, impersonal view. Psychic distance can be thought of as occurring at different levels of distance; in other words this is  a spectrum, or scale. 

In his work, The Art of Fiction, John Gardner (1983) offer five points on the scale, with the largest distance between the reader and the events of the story being represented as the beginning “level” at level 1. As the psychic distance between the reader and the story narrows, psychic distance progresses through levels 2-4,  with level 5 representing the closest distance between the reader and the events of the story. Gardner gives five examples showing how psychic distance exists on a continuum. 

The furthest psychic distance, viewing the scene from far away and with some formality would be: ‘It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of the doorway’. In contrast, the closest psychic distance, where the reader experiences first-hand the events of the story, reads like this: ‘Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.’ 

A single piece of fiction may require a mixture of psychic distances, and Gardner makes the point that skilled authors control the inevitable shifts that are needed with care and without alienating the reader. At one end, readers are up close and personal with characters, experiencing the world through their senses and getting to know their innermost thoughts and emotions. At the other end of the narrative distance scale, readers get very little character insight. The story’s setting, events and character behaviour are conveyed objectively and unemotionally.

Most novels travel up and down the psychic distance scale. Authors vary narrative distance to give rhythm to their writing – and to share both the inner world of a viewpoint character and the wider context of the external world. Too great a narrative distance can cause problems for your story. When you create too much narrative distance:

• Readers struggle to make an emotional connection to your characters
• Readers are less invested in story events
• Readers are less engaged with your story as a whole

These are all problems associated with SHOW, DON'T TELL. That is because  psychic distance  is linked to SHOW, DON'T TELL. This may feel an odd thing to say, but look at the Level One example from Gardner, that with the widest distance: 

It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of the doorway’. 

This is remote and objective. It is exposition, in other words, it is TELL.  

It doesn't give us ay sense of   particular characters in the story as  persons with thoughts and feelings. The narrator is very much in charge,TELLING us a lot about where we are and what's happening: it's all about information and context. But if it stays at this level we might not care much about the people that the story is telling us about, and it limits the writer's scope for exploring how they experience the world and themselves. 

Compare this to the Level Five example; ‘Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.’  Here, the reader is already inside the character's head to such a degree we can see him most intimate thoughts. The author is SHOWING us the character's thoughts. They are close-up and subjective: almost a brain download, with thoughts and sensory information all jumbled up. The character's voice is wholly present and the narrator's voice has faded out. It's extremely expressive of this person's character and situation. 

One of the reasons for moving around in the spectrum of psychic distance is that staying at such a close level, where the character's thoughts are all on SHOW,  the reader may fail to understand what's going on in the outside world of the story.  

Lisa Cron, in her book, Wired for Story, (2015) argues that the best way to convey thoughts in the third person limited is ‘akin to telepathy’ ) and that the greatest stories ‘clue you into what the characters are thinking so deftly that when it comes to figuring out exactly how they did it, you’re still left wondering’ . She cautions against the use of italics, quotation marks and tags because ‘once you master the art of slipping your characters’ thoughts onto the page, the reader can automatically differentiate a character’s inner thoughts from the narrator’s voice’ 

It is generally considered that the first-person is a more subtle way of gaining access to a character’s mind, where you can go deeper into a character. But by using the technique of closer psychic distance, the limited third-person point of view can be just as intimate, if you wish it to be. 

 Virginia Woolf, who famously was able to enter the deepest parts of a characters mind always uses masses of close psychic distance, to the point of stream of consciousness. The does make her books a challenge! 

Thinking no harm, for the family would not come, never again, some said, and the house would be sold at Michaelmas perhaps, Mrs. McNab stooped and picked a bunch of flowers to take home with her [...] There it had stood all these years without a soul in it. The books and things were mouldy for, what with the war and help being hard to get, the house had not been cleaned as she could have wished. It was beyond one person’s strength to get it straight now [...] This had been the nursery. Why it was all damp in here; the plaster was falling. Whatever did they want to hang a beast’s skull there for? gone mouldy too. And rats in all the attics. The rain came in. But they never sent; never came. Some of the locks had gone, so the doors banged. She didn’t like to be up here at dusk alone neither. It was too much for one woman, too much, too much. To The Lighthouse (1927)

However, Philip Pullman successfully uses a more distant psychic narration  in his fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials. 

In Book One, Northern Lights, (1995) the heroine, Lyra 

Belacqua, has been captured and is in danger:

 ‘It wasn’t Lyra’s way to brood; she was a sanguine and practical child, and besides, she wasn’t imaginative. No one with much imagination would have thought seriously that it was possible to come all this way and rescue her friend Roger’.

Pullman’s style is to give objective comments and observations about his protagonist, leaving us with little doubt that it must be true.

Here is a great example from Hilary Mantel of closing in, slowly, from a greater psychic distance towards a very close one. It's from Wolf Hall (2009). Watch how we see Stephen from a distance, as Mantel TELLS us about him, and then zooms in tightly until she's SHOWING us his thoughts.

New Year 1529: Stephen Gardiner is in Rome, issuing certain threats to Pope Clement, on the king’s behalf; the content of the threats has not been divulged to the cardinal. Clement is easily panicked at the best of times, and it is not surprising that, with Master Stephen breathing sulphur in his ear, he falls ill. They are saying that he is likely to die, and the cardinal’s agents are around and about in Europe, taking soundings and counting heads, chinking their purses cheerfully. There would be a swift solution to the king’s problem, if Wolsey were Pope. He grumbles a little about his possible eminence; the cardinal loves his country, its May garlands, its tender birdsong. In his nightmares he sees squat spitting Italians, a forest of nooses, a corpse-strewn plain.

I'm not the only writer to think that psychic distance is part of showing and telling. Here's Emma  Darwen in The Itch of Writing;

My own lightbulb moment about this stuff happened when I saw that John Gardner's Psychic Distance fits beautifully with Showing and Telling, (or as I like to call it, Informing and Evoking)...The takeaway idea, if you like, is that different voices - the narrator's and the characters' - combine to make the narrative, interpenetrating each other to different degrees depending on the writer's decision about the best psychic distance for that moment in the story.

And  Writers in the Storm blog agrees with this idea. SHOWING is part of advanced POV techniques, especially when psychically close to the character's internal monologue; 

Point of view (POV) is the silver bullet of writing. If you master this, 95% of the common writing problems a writer faces will vanish. A solid point of view puts you (and your readers) firmly in a character's head, seeing the world through their eyes, and experiencing that world as they would naturally experience it. ..Seeing the story through a character's eyes means you'll write it as that character sees it, not as you see it. It helps keep you from pulling away and describing (telling) the scene from afar.

What am I thinking and feeling?

Because thinking about SHOW, DON'T TELL allows readers to understand what the characters are feeling, and why they act the way they do, you can use this close perspective when you want to make this clear, and pull the reader in, making them part of the story, not a spectator on the sidelines. It involves them emotionally. Sometimes, that's just what you want as the writer of your story.