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We’re going to talk about narrative distance. (Or psychic distance. Or, sometimes, emotional distance.)

It’s one of the most important tools in the writer’s armoury and the fluid use of it adds depth and motion to your text. You may very well be using the technique perfectly without being aware of it. Or you may have an aha moment in this email that illuminates something and unlocks a whole new level of your writing.

We start with a simple definition and some examples.

Narrative distance has to do with how far your narration is from your character’s innermost heart and thoughts. So:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

That’s Dickens commenting on eighteenth-century London, and he’s swooping, god-like, over an entire city, or an entire country. He’s so not-close to a character that no characters have yet appeared in the book.

But you can swoop in further:

“It was the Dover Road … on a Friday night late in November.”

We’re getting more specific about time and place now. We haven’t yet hit character, but we’re getting closer. We move in again:

“The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.”

Things are now completely external (still no character to focus on), but time and place has become completely precise. It’s not that Dickens has given us precise co-ordinates of place and time, but whereas “Friday night” refers to a whole reach of time, the sound of this galloping horse must be heard within one specific half-minute of that night.

We swoop in again.

A coach – the Dover mailcoach – stops. The horseman asks for a Mr Jarvis Lorry. And:

“[The] passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. The guard, the coachman, and the two other passengers eyed him distrustfully.”

We’re now, as it were, face to face, with our character. If that “best of times” quotation had Dickens flying over London, we’re now in a coach right next to a person. We’re close enough that we see him physically acknowledging his name.

That said, our view of this character is still external. We’re not in his head at all.

As it happens, this scene from Dickens is just an appetiser. He doesn’t plunge all the way into the man’s head. But he could have done:

“Jarvis Lorry reached thoughtfully for the note.”

That word “thoughtfully” is somewhere between a purely external view and a genuinely internal one. Yes, we can sort of see from someone’s manner whether they’re thoughtful or not, but the word could equally well be used by the excellent Mr Lorry to describe himself.

“He pondered a moment.” And now we’re definitely in his head. No one outside the admirable Lorry knows if he’s pondering or not.

“As he read the missive, a slow fury crept over him.”

From thought to emotion, and our sense of interiority grows greater.

“The devils! Would they never leave him be?”

And boom! The character has now taken over the actual narration. We’re in stream-of-consciousness mode. The character’s own thoughts are spilling, live and unedited, onto the page.

And that’s narrative distance, the whole spectrum from hyper-remote to extremely intimate. From being actually removed from any characters at all to so up close and personal that the character themself barges the narrator off the page.

Why this matters

I hope there’s something conceptually interesting about noticing this narrative spectrum. As I say, you quite likely deploy it fluidly and without noticing it. But to notice it fully can illuminate various elements of your text.

For one thing, there’s rhythm. If you operate only at one level of psychic distance, your text will have a monotonous quality, much as if you had to watch a movie with no close-ups and no panoramas.

For another, there’s movement. If you want to zoom right into a character’s innermost thoughts, you can. This is fiction. You can and should. But you can’t just crash into them without a graduated approach. You need to shift fluidly through the gears, getting closer in on the character, step by step by step. (Just think how crashingly awkward it would be to jump from “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” straight to “Jarvis Lorry reached thoughtfully for the note. The devils! Would they never leave him be.” Because the approach has been so rushed, the text is unengaging and hard to read.)

And then there’s usage. When do we want to be right inside a character’s head? When that character is experiencing strong, significant emotion, of course.

When do we want to be zoomed out and somewhat detached from character? Well, when we simply want to convey important external data about the scene, of course.

When you think of it like that, it’s easy enough, but put all the pieces together and you have a powerful, powerful tool at your disposal.

Because this post has run on long enough already, I’ll shut up now. But because these things make more sense in context, I’ve pasted a chunk of one of my scenes in the PSes below. That scene has a whole graduated movement from basically external to extremely internal. It’s delivered, what’s more, in first person narration, which just goes to show that these psychic distance issues are conceptually identical, whether or not you have an external narrator.

That’s it from me. I’m about to saddle up and head for Dover. Giddy on up!

Feel free to pile in with your own comments and observations in the comments thread below. Meantime here's a slice of my forthcoming Fiona novel, with plenty of comments - here's psychic distance happening in the flesh ...

____

So here’s a chunk from my forthcoming Fiona Griffiths novel. Bits in square brackets are my commentary on the whole psychic distance thing. The setting, by the way, is a secure psychiatric hospital, which is not a setting my Fiona is likely to enjoy …

The transport whirrs up the little slope.

Strange how a little knowledge alters the scene. Yesterday, with Rogers fulminating away about a rest-cure for psychos, all we saw was beauty. The sparkling sea, the scatter of buildings. [External. Loosely anchored in the past. Even the descriptions suggest something viewed from afar.]

Now, all I can see is those yellow marker stones. The panic button and the taser. Those hummocks of stamped-down turf. [Descriptions now much more specific, local.]

And suddenly – it feels real. [When you shift from far-out narrative distance to something closer in, you get that sense of enhanced reality, so Fiona is just voicing what the reader already half-feels.]

This place. It’s not a rest cure. It’s a supermax prison for psychos. The pretty buildings are just window-dressing. A cloak tossed over darkness.

The float whirrs up to reception and stops.

I don’t get out.

Say, ‘Sorry. Sorry, I just need . . .’

I don’t say what I need, but my heart is racing. My face and neck are slippery with sweat. I have my head down between my knees and I think I want to vomit. [We’re getting even closer in now. We see the sweat on her face and neck. We feel her sickness.]

A wash of fear.

A constricting awfulness. [There’s something almost panicky in her language now. Very short paragraphs and main verbs have gone AWOL.]

Mervyn Rogers thought I was the right person for this particular job. Oh, leave it to Griffiths. Sure, she’ll piss a few people off and make a cock of things, but it always comes right in the end. She’ll sort it out.

And he couldn’t be more wrong. He’s the wrongest person on earth.

The driver says, ‘You all right? We’ve got a doctor on site if you need.’

I shake my head.

Can’t talk. [Notice that she says, “Can’t talk” not, “I can’t talk” or “But I find myself unable to talk.” It’s like Fiona’s mounting panic is interrupting her ability even to narrate normally. Her gaspiness is making her narration gasp too.]

Wipe sweat off my forehead, but it returns instantly.

A prison for nutters. That’s where I am. That’s what this is. A prison for nutters with an unhealthy interest in violence.

[Boom! And these are Fiona’s thoughts, quoted real time. The slightly formal, reader-aware narration with which we started has been replaced by this panicked and forceful stream of consciousness.]

My heart is a long way distant from my chest.

It is a bird taking refuge in a treetop. It is a rabbit watching its own skin fold down over its eyes.

[And so on. Obviously, you can’t write like this for long without crowding the reader – being over-intense, over-intimate. So gradually the scene starts to pull back again. It ends where it started, with a nice formal narration of who does what, goes where, and says what. Narrative distance: I thank you for your services. I couldn’t write without you.]

 Now over to you. Thoughts, comments, questions below ...

So. Elevator pitches.

That’s something we dealt with in one of my Festival workshops, and I wanted to pick it up again now. The issue is both finding the pitch that sparks interest in your book, then figuring out what to do once you have a pitch you love.

But let’s start with a sample elevator pitch. This one for example:

A) Boy with magical powers plays a key part in the battle of good against evil.

What do you think? Do you like it? Do you want to read that book?

And look: the pitch is sort of okaaaay, isn’t it? But OK in a way which means that the book is basically not saleable. It’s just too like every other kids fantasy book out there. There’s nothing to distinguish this book from everything else. If I were an agent, it’s not a book I’d much care to represent.

So what about this?

B) Orphan goes to a school for wizards.

Or this:

C) Orphan discovers he is the son of two very powerful wizards.  He goes to wizard school.

Or this:

D) Harry Potter is an orphan in the care of his uncle and aunt. Their care is very poor.
Potter lives in an understairs cupboard, while his cousin is spectacularly spoiled.
The non-magical (or ‘muggle’) uncle and aunt try to prevent
Harry learning about his parents – powerful wizards – but fail.
He discovers he has magical powers and is invited (via owl) to attend wizard school.

Pretty clearly, this is a series of books that could do rather well. Yet there’s a way in which elevator pitch A actually delivers the best description of the books. After all, the entire series arc is encapsulated in that description. The other three elevator pitches deal with nothing more than a few chapters of book 1. In effect, they deliver the inciting incident and the immediate consequences, but little or nothing of the actual substance of the book.

So why is that first pitch so weak? And why are the other three strong?

The simple answer is that elevator pitch B makes you want to know more. It has, instantly, that “Oooh, tell me more” quality which marks out any good elevator pitch.

And indeed, when I do tell you more – when we jump from version B to version C – you still want to know more. Version C introduces Harry Potter’s parentage. That’s good, because it provides a connection between the orphan element and the wizarding one, but it introduces questions of its own. You still just want to know more.

Version D might be a reasonable answer to that ‘tell me more’ question, except it isn’t really an elevator pitch any more. It’s too long. But you notice that even when you’re dealing with something as long and detailed as D, you still have an appetite for more. (How does an owl send an invitation? How does Harry discover his magical powers? Why are the uncle and aunt so mean? And so on.)

These expanding descriptions of the book keep you locked into a permanent desire to know more … and if I handed you the first chunk of HP and the Philosopher’s Stone, you’d still be burning to know how the book and the series develops. That ‘tell me more’ impulse keeps pushing you to know more until you’ve read every damn book in the series.

Which brings us back to why it’s so unbelievably helpful for writers to understand their own elevator pitches. Why you need to scrap pitches that feel as bland and generic as (A) and find ones that are as sharp and precise as (B) or (C).

The thing is, you don’t ever have to use your elevator pitch with an agent, or an editor, or anyone else. There’s never going to be a ten-word box that you have to fill in about your book. But you do have to understand the bit that makes readers go, “tell me more”, and then place that bit at the emotional / structural centre of your work.

So if JK Rowling had been working with (A) as her internal compass for the series, she might have minimised her hero’s orphanhood, she might not have found key roles for his vanished parents, and she might not have placed Hogwarts at the very heart of things. She might, in fact, have produced another bland, generic and unpublishable work of children’s fantasy.

But because, at least in her head, she was working with something like (B) or (C) as an elevator pitch, she placed those elements – orphan, wizarding parents, wizard school – at the very heart of the books. So yes, the series tells a story about the battle of good vs evil, but that story emerges from one founded on the exact elements that piqued the reader’s interest in the first place.

The same thing is true of absolutely any decent book and decent elevator pitch. So the pitch for my Fiona Griffiths series would probably be something like this:

A crime series about a detective in recovery from Cotards Syndrome,
a genuine psychiatric condition. With Cotards, a sufferer
 believes themselves to be dead.

That doesn’t tell you anything about the plots of the individual books, or the series arc, or anything else. In that sense, it’s ‘local’ not universal. But that element of localism is essentially always true of good elevator pitches. Compare the universal-but-bland Harry Potter pitch A, against the local-and-interesting pitches B or C.

And books are founded on the local. The universal can and should spring out of the local, but the local has to take precedence. So the whole architecture of Hogwarts / the Dursleys / muggle world vs wizarding world forms the foundations for the grand, universal story that lies on top. (And notice too, that whereas the Harry Potter pitch focused on the basic set up and the inciting incident, my own pitch ignores that completely and focuses only on character. The nugget at the heart of your pitch can come from anywhere.)

The local vs universal thing is at work with the Fiona Griffiths stuff too.

The whole complex series arc is built on Fiona herself. Her illness. Her recovery. Her strange sisterhood with the dead. My German publishers, in fact, have essentially the same cover for every book they’ve released. Each book has “FIONA” in huge text front and centre across the cover. The actual title looks secondary in comparison. That’s an almost literal picture of how the series is built. Hogwarts, and all that pertains to it, has a similar centrality in the Harry Potter books.

So find your foundation. Find the thing that makes readers want to know more. Then place that thing, that vibration of interest, at the very heart of what follows. Make sure that as you start to expand the reader’s circle of knowledge, the new elements you introduce keep the reader’s interest.

That, in a nutshell, is how you write and sell books.

So now over to you. What's your elevator pitch. And does it feel bland and universal? Or is there a local, specific quality which prompts that "tell me more?" response. Leave a comment and let's all have a Heated Debate.

Twas the Festival of Writing last weekend, with a hey and ho and a hey nonny nonny.

My highlights? Everything, really. It’s just like a great big bale of fun and passion and intensity squished down into a weekend-sized pellet and washed down with a bottle of wine. (Or two, if you write crime thrillers. Or three, if you’re an agent.)

If you came, then it was lovely to see you. If you didn’t, pshaw! Come next year, and we can be friends anyway.

I’ll probably have a few Festival-related missives to send, but I’ll start with the one about the head in the bag.

So:

I was giving a workshop on how to build a crime novel, using my own This Thing of Darkness as an exemplar. The basic thrust of the class was how to build your novel up, bone by bone, and how you don’t always begin that process from the most logical starting point. In my TToD, for example, I knew I wanted a denouement at sea – Fiona Griffiths on a fishing trawler in a storm – but that’s all I knew. I didn’t know the crime. I didn’t know anything about the solution. I didn’t have anything else really nailed down.

And then: I built from there. I hauled my big structural milestones into place until I was confident I had a layout that could sustain a crime novel. (The twist in that little tale of triumph? Simply that at one point I had a 130,000 word novel that felt long and boring. Whoops. I talked a bit about how I solved that issue too.)

But then I threw the crime-novel problem over to the class. I wanted us to build a novel then and there, to get some sense of what could and couldn’t work.

To start with, I asked for an opening crime to launch our novel - the inciting incident, in effect. One person suggested a dead student. Apparent suicide. Whisky and pill bottle. Yadda, yadda.

Now that’s a perfectly fine opening thought. And, to be clear, this was suggested ad lib, on the basis of precisely zero planning. The student setting was suggested by our own university surroundings. And, OK, we all know books that start much like that.

But?

There’s nothing there to suggest an angle. Nothing unique. Nothing pressing. Nothing to make an agent (or an editor or a supermarket book browser) say, “Oh wow. Want to know more.”

Now that can be OK. My first Fiona Griffiths novel had a crime so boring I can hardly remember it myself. (People trafficking. A couple of people bumped off as possible informers. All very 1.01 in terms of crime premise.)

But that first book of mine had something extravagantly memorable – it just wasn’t the crime. It had to do with Fiona herself; her past, her illness, her family background. And that’s fine. You need one golden line for an elevator pitch. That’s all. The element you care to emphasise can be anything at all.

But still. Because we were building a crime novel in class, I drew attention to the basic dullness of that setup crime. A dead student? Looks like a suicide but we all know it wasn’t? I wanted to do better.

And boom! I was running the class with an agent, Tom Witcomb at Blake Friedman, and he piped up with an alternative crime:

• Romantic dinner for two in Paris. Young Man proposes to His Beloved.
• His Beloved, tearfully, says no.
• Young Man, heart-broken, walks the streets of Paris, filling the Seine with his tears.
• He gathers his belongings, heads to the Gare Du Nord, and prepares for a life of loneliness and despair
• At the station, he’s pulled aside by a guard. He’s asked to open his bag. And there, blankly staring and still softly dripping, is the head of His Beloved.

I hope you can see the instant improvement here. That premise is basically all set up for a book that sells to an agent, a publisher and a supermarket buyer.

Yes: a million questions remain unanswered, but the basic sell is instant, strong and memorable. You can pretty much imagine the cover already. (“He proposed. She refused. And someone killed her.” “The must-read thriller that everyone’s talking about.”)

Of course, a good premise is thirty good pages, nothing more. There’s a lot more to be done to complete a plausible novel. Some thoughts:

• Who tells this novel? Tom W saw the Parisian detective as the central character. Personally, I think this is beautifully designed to be a proper psychological thriller with Young Man as the narrator. Done that way, the book would be a did-he or didn’t-he story the whole way through, with the reader changing their minds about five times through the book.
• Who did kill the Beloved? A criminal gang? Some shadow from her dark past? Probably. But the marriage proposal had to be causally linked to her death. So the Beloved would still be alive if Young Man hadn’t proposed. You can’t just have the death as a random accident.
• Climax and Denouement. For me, the Parisian setting is important, not just a throwaway starter. So the climax probably needs a Parisian, or at least a French, setting. One delegate suggested we have a battle on top of the Eiffel Tower with some bad guy being hurled to his death. That’s probably a bit comedic, in all honesty, but the basic thought process is spot on.

The hard part of this book is going to be knitting together the Beloved’s dark past with the head in the bag. I mean, yes, you could imagine scenarios where bad guys want to kill the Beloved. But why don’t the bad guys just drop Beloved into the river? Why go to all the trouble of sticking a head into Young Man’s hand luggage?

You will need to find an answer to that question that’s plausible enough to carry the book. Not real, true-to-life plausible, perhaps, but something that gets you over the line. (In my The Dead House, I had a basic plausibility issue with my crime. I don’t think the crime I dealt with has ever or would ever happen, but I probably did just enough to get away with it in fictional terms. That’s all you need.)

I’ve talked about all this in the context of crime, but the same kind of thinking applies no matter what your genre. Some strong selling line. Some good unity of concept and tightness of execution. Lots of trial and error when it comes to developing a given starting point.

That’s plotting. That’s writing. And it’s hard! But it’s fun.

What about you? How do you construct a novel? Do you start with an inciting incident? WIth an elevator pitch? With something random? And what do you do from there? Tell all.

Oh yes, and I'm going to run a completely free webinar or two this autumn. Just tell me what you'd like me to talk about and I'll put my thnking cap on. No subject excluded, except possibly Brexit.