The Dilemma of Narrative Distance
By Donald Maass | November 2, 2022 |
The most difficult aspect of craft for participants at the workshops that I teach to master is immersive POV. (Sometimes referred to as deep POV.) It’s puzzling, since that narrative perspective is so much like how our human consciousness really is.
Briefly, immersive POV is an enhancement of close third-person POV, that durable perspective on the page which strictly reports only what a POV character would see and hear. Immersive POV takes that idea a step further. It reports on the page not only what the camera’s eye and microphone’s ear would get, but a character’s whole experience of what is happening.
The simplest way to understand the difference is that immersive POV adds to any story moment what a character is feeling or thinking about anything in the story environment. The advantage of immersive POV is that it can capture in words non-material things, such as the mood of a crowd or the effect of a painting on a viewer.
What hangs writers up, I think, is that the content generated using immersive POV at first feels “extra” to the story. I notice that in the way workshop participants talk about it. They call immersive passages they write to prompts set by me “going inside”. They split manuscript content into two categories, “outer” and “inner”. A common workshop question is, how much “inner” is the right amount?
That’s like asking how much chocolate is right in making a mug of hot chocolate? The drink has a milk or water base, true, but why think of the chocolate as something that’s tasted separately? It’s not. Hot chocolate is an indivisible consumption experience. Whether the ratio of chocolate is “right” or not is irrelevant. There’s only hot chocolate. (Okay, maybe with marshmallows floating on top but let’s not make this analogy overly complicated.)
The fear that’s felt by writers adopting immersive POV is that “inner” content will slow the story down. It’s the stuff that critique partners say should be cut. When inner is handled clumsily, that advice can be on the button. Handled skillfully, though, and that scissoring advice is forgotten. Inner stuff can be the best stuff on the page. However, I suspect that there’s a deeper anxiety at work, one that I think of as the dilemma of narrative distance.
There are two ways to convey the substance of a story: to float apart from it or to dive into the deep end. There are pluses and minuses to each approach. Each gives readers a different reading experience. Standing apart from the story means showing what’s happening to readers, letting readers see the story in their mind’s eyes and feel the story’s effect for themselves.
Conveying characters’ emotional and cognitive involvement in what’s happening, on the other hand, is intimate. It brings readers right inside the mind and heart of someone else, bringing alive another person’s authentic self and enriching a story with meanings that readers might not have found on their own.
It’s a dilemma, then: Do you trust your readers to “get” the story or do you want them to lift them from themselves and immerse them in another’s consciousness? In one approach, readers are sure to see the story vividly. In the other approach, readers are certain to understand what characters in the story are going through.
It feels like you can’t have both, you write one way or the other, but that’s a false dichotomy. Great novels use both ends of the spectrum of narrative distance, but to do that effectively requires understanding the means and purpose of each and the chemistry of their interaction. Both modes have strengths and pitfalls. Mishandled, one approach can feel cold and uninvolving while the other can feel messy and unnecessary.
What Inner and Outer are For—and When
It’s not accurate, ask me, to think of “outer” mode as coolly objective, standing apart from the story simply to report the action, record the dialogue, and maybe to enhance the tale with a bit of atmosphere. Word choice, syntax, style, imagery and more heavily shade how readers undergo a story. The languages of horror and romance novels are quite different, for example, and therefore so are the moods and expectations of such readers.
It’s also not accurate, either, to think that if characters’ thoughts and feelings are conveyed in nuanced detail that readers will be left with nothing of their own to feel. Readers are not puppets. They do not check their hearts and minds at the door but rather bring them along on the journey. Whatever the find on the page, they react to. They anticipate, weigh, judge, ponder and come up with responses to what they’re reading in ways as abundant as flakes of snow. No two reader responses are identical.
When and why, then, do you want to stand apart or to dive deep? You might think that it depends on what a given sentence, paragraph or passage is intended to do. Convey movement? Show something happening? Evoke a mental picture of someone or something? In such cases you might suppose that a more factual or strictly visual approach would be better.
By the same token, if the purpose is to process, reflect, review, decide or in any other way use a character’s feelings or thinking to move the story forward, then it would seem that an immersive mode is called for. Actually, both presumptions are misleading. They may even get it backwards.
Action and movement are by themselves cold. Characters’ thoughts and feelings aren’t always warmly involving, either. “Inner” passages can read as flat as descriptions of stone. Suspense in high action comes not from guns, bullets and careening cars but from the surprising things that POV characters are feeling as those things fly. Likewise, intimate connection to a POV’s character’s feelings does not occur when those feelings are exactly as expected. When characters think thoughts that readers have already thought for themselves, by the same token, readers tune out.
Thus, the choice has less to do with what’s going on at any given moment on the page and more to do with what will catch readers off guard. Readers may see more vividly when they feel something they don’t expect. They may feel more profoundly when they are directed away from feelings themselves and are instead cued by things that they visualize, or hear, or should but that are missing.
Showing is better then telling? Sometimes. Telling is as effective as showing? Sometimes. The choice of how to handle anything on the page doesn’t depend on the purpose of what’s going on the page but rather on what will best work on readers.
The Chemistry Between Inner and Outer
Removed or intimate, narrative distance is like hot chocolate: to have the yummy experience you need both the base and the flavoring. They are inseparably mixed together. One without the other is only half of the thrill. So how do you blend the two effectively? Again, I think that’s a misleading question. The better question is what makes the application of either ingredient effective?
The tendency in manuscripts is to first off get us to “see” where we are and who we’re with. Hey, unless we have a picture of the story heads we’re adrift on an empty ocean, right? Actually, what we need more, at the outset, is a commanding narrative voice. Next, we need reasons to care, most especially about protagonists but also about what they are tasked, by you, with doing.
To illustrate solutions to the dilemma of narrative distance, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some examples of contemporary noir stories: gritty, down-in-the-dirt tales that we would expect to be either two-fisted, violent action all the way and/or saturated with over-the-top, hackneyed and mawkish emotional content. A close look, though, yields some surprises.
S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears (2021) follows his highly lauded debut Blacktop Wasteland (2020). It’s the story of an ex-con, Ike Randolph, who’s kept out of trouble for fifteen years but knows that a Black man is never safe from the cops. When he learns that his son, Isiah, and his son’s husband Derek have been murdered, he’s devastated. Derek’s father—never comfortable with his son’s sexuality—wants to know who killed their boys. The two ex-cons work together and of course will be changed by each other.
Cosby knows however, that we will not be on board for this grim tale of revenge unless we have reasons to care. Yes, the novel begins with cops at Ike’s door, but the emotional hook comes at conclusion of the funeral in Chapter 2 when Ike’s grief has nowhere else to go:
Ike Randolph let go of his wife’s hand. She slumped against him. Ike stared down at his hands. His empty hands. Hands that had held his boy when he was barely ten minutes old. The hands that had shown him how to tie his shoes. The hands that had rubbed salve on his chest when he had the flu. That had waved goodbye to him in court with shackles tight around his wrists. Rough callused hands that he hid in his pockets when Isiah’s husband had offered to shake them.
Ike dropped his chin to his chest.
The passage is about grief, but how does it evoke that? Not by using obvious feelings—grief washed over him like a powerful tide—by with visual imagery, a history of raising his son told through Ike’s hands…his now-empty hands. Showing? Yes, and it tells us everything we need to see that Ike is an ex-con with a heart. He loved his son as much as any man, maybe more. Now, everything he will do later will be understandable.
Chapter 3 of Cosby’s novel switches POV to that of Derek’s grieving father Buddy Lee. It’s after the funeral but that doesn’t keep the rent collector from coming to the trailer door. The narrative job at this point is to show not one father’s grief but another father’s helplessness. The “action” will be Buddy Lee unable to do anything, a negative action as it were, that must nevertheless become active in the sense of sinking Buddy Lee deeper into the feelings that will motivate him to go forward. Buddy Lee takes a picture of himself holding Derek at age one from his wallet:
Buddy Lee wondered what the young fella in the picture would think of the old man he’d become. That fella was full of gunpowder and gasoline. If he looked really close, he could see a small mouse under his right eye. A souvenir he’d acquired collecting a debt for Chuly Pettigrew. The man in that picture was wild and dangerous. Always down for a fight and up to no good. If Artie [the rent collector] had spoken ill of Derek in front of that man, he would have waited until dark and then cut his throat for him. Watched him bleed out all over the gravel before taking him somewhere dark and desolate. Knocked out his teeth and cut off his hands and buried him in a shallow grave covered in about fifty pounds of pulverized lime. The man in the picture would have gone home, made love to his woman, and not lost a minute’s sleep.
Derek was different. Whatever rot that lived in the roots of the Jenkins family free had bypassed Derek. His son was so full of positive potential that it made him glow like a shooting star from the day he was born. He had accomplished more in his twenty-seven years than most of the entire Jenkins bloodline had in a generation. Buddy’s Lee’s hands began to shake.
Telling? Yes, but how many of have visualized justice or revenge in such graphic detail? Or maybe we have, and that’s what makes this “inner” passage compelling? Regret? Sorrow? Disappointment in himself? Love for his son? It’s all there but expressed by remembering himself when he was the opposite of now.
Later on, Cosby’s novel will turn highly graphic and extremely ugly, with action so bluntly reported that you feel the cold trip of a revolver barrel pressed against you. At that point, narrative distance works because we have first been immersed in the grief, helplessness and more of Ike and Buddy Lee. Is the action the milk and the feelings the chocolate sauce in this brew, or is it the other way around? Like I said, that’s the wrong way to look at it. To make the drink, two modes of narrative distance have to blend inseparably.
Gabino Iglesias’s The Devil Takes You Home (2022) follows his Zero Saints (2015) and Coyote Songs (2018). It’s the story of an immigrant, Mario, whose little daughter is dying of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Mario and his wife need money. Iglesias knows that before we get to the means by which Mario will get the money, we need to understand his desperation:
Within weeks of the diagnosis, your Anita went from a ball of unstoppable energy to a thin bird with broken wings. I’d hold her tiny body against mine and feel everything inside me break at once. An invisible monster was devouring her, feasting on her innocence, and there was nothing I could do about it.
So we prayed. Melisa and I prayed and clasped hands and gritted teeth. We prayed with a rosary clutched so tightly in our hands palms would sport tiny half-moons for hours. We prayed with spittle flying out of our mouths and tears in our eyes. We prayed and made deals, made promises, made threats. We prayed with every ounce of energy in our bodies. We asked La Virgencity to save our baby. We asked God to intercede. We asked the angels to lend a hand. We asked the saints to help us win this battle. They all stayed quiet, and death lived in that silence.
What would you call that passage, telling or showing? It shows us two parents of a dying daughter praying but tells us all we need to know. Now, when Mario accepts a job as a hit man, we believe it and not just because he’ll get six thousand dollars. Soon—this is only sixteen pages into the novel—Mario is walking up behind a man as the man’s unlocking the door of his house. Mario has a 9mm Luger in his hand:
Suddenly, I wanted to tear those keys out of the man’s hands and use the serrated edges to run through his shadowy eye sockets. I wanted to kill him, to inflict as much pain on him as possible, and I couldn’t explain why. He was a bad man, but I didn’t know how bad. I didn’t know if he deserved to die, but that wasn’t as much of a deterrent as I knew it should have been. Maybe the man had stolen from rich assholes just like him. Maybe he liked blow on the weekends and had snorted more than he could pay for. I didn’t know his crimes, but the desire to punish him was there, as strong as anything I’d ever felt. The feeling scared me, but I kind of liked it too.
I stepped from behind the van as the man finally jammed the key into the door and turned the knob. I took four quick steps forward, placed the gun against the back of his head, and pulled the trigger.
The night exploded in my ears.
Notice how the two modes of narrative distance work in that passage. Mario’s seething fury and need to kill is cleverly conveyed by negative contrast—I didn’t know if he deserved to die—set against the cold and objective reporting of the act itself: I stepped from behind the van…took four quick steps forward…
Holy crap! Will he really do it? He does. The writing here is pulp in the best sense, cold and horrifying, but does Iglesias’s dish out his narrative distance at a great remove, reporting just the facts, ma’am? Not a chance. Inner and outer work together and the effect is more effective than the sum of its two components.
The Cold Facts and the Deep Dive
So where does this leave you and the dilemma? Half the fear of the deep dive, I sometimes think, is the writer’s own fear of getting messy and personal. We’re not conditioned to bleed our feelings in front of others. Safer is stay aloof, sending characters crossing a room with maybe only a snappy adverb to spark up the stroll. Why risk delving into that walk, how it feels and what it means? After all, it’s only a walk across a room. Choreography.
Other writers, though, overdo it: gushing about everything, turning over every nuance, exploring every implication, delving into every ounce of feeling as if it weighs like gold. Needless to say, that’s not so. In cases like that, I sometimes suspect that the writer is trying to compensate for an insecurity over a thin plot. Saturation bombing with feelings might by itself elevate a story with only fairly ordinary human drama to offer.
My point here is that what feels like a dilemma, a set of opposing and mutually contradictory narrative modes, actually only exists in a writer’s mind. When narrative distance is neither always aloof nor relentlessly intimate but rather blends together, it allows us to experience the story both for ourselves and as the characters also do. There’s room for both. Even more, I would say that there’s a need for both. The dilemma has a solution and it’s to recognize that there’s really no dilemma in the first place.
Which comes more naturally to you, inner or outer mode? Why? And how and when might the other mode serve your story better?
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
[coffee]
Once upon a time these points of view were called 3rd person objective, 3rd person limited, and 3rd person omniscient. I wonder when and why the terminology evolved.
Excellent analysis. Awareness of pov is the key to getting it to work for you.
On a similar note, I don’t see the term stream of consciousness used these days. But maybe that’s because I’m not in academia.
Terminology, ask me, is only there to give us a shorthand way to talk about a long and complex effect. There’s also Authorial POV, let’s not forget that one. Increasingly, my perspective is that whether close or distant, first or third person, agnostic or intrusive, the truth is that every story is informed and–I would say–enlivened by the sensibility of whomever is telling the tale.
Authors are telling their stories for reasons. They bring their whole selves and history to the story that they write. That’s as is should be. Once you recognize that you cannot be separated from your story, nor should you be, it has no independent existence, then all other issues including POV are matters of choice. Manuscripts are weak when a novel’s components remain not choices but thoughtless, innate preferences.
Being in control of novel you’re writing is, I think, first of all a matter of accepting that you own it 100%. You might think that’s always true for every writer, but it’s not. I see that in the manuscript reading that I do.
Could you expand on this taxonomy a bit? I am interested in the confusion that always seems to exist about POV in online discussions and book clubs—and it (of course) often hinges on semantics.
Thanks!
Best,
_Mark
Thank you for this insight. A stoic upbringing coupled with journalism school left me focused on the outer mode. But readers need some assistance to connect with characters. Sharing their inner thoughts (and backstory) are necessary for context. With creative writing, I’ve always struggled to locate emotions. Working on it! These examples help.
Chris, there are effective ways and ineffective ways to handle “inner” content, the thoughts and feelings of POV characters. One ineffective approach is what I call “churning”, turning over emotions and thoughts that are already obvious to the reader.
Plot review is a form of that. For example: “What should he do? Bob was torn. Was killing the killer of his son really any better? Would it relieve his grief? Was revenge any less murder than murder in the first place?” Well, duh. Any reader can ask themselves the existential question underlying a revenge story, and probably already did so just reading the jacket flap. The obvious questions land in the reader brain with a dull thud.
I’ve written previously on WU about the necessity of surprise on the page, and counter-acting the effect of the “static hiss” of the ordinary business of a day. Have a look.
Hey Don — Your teachings have kept me conscious of this “dilemma” for years. There’s an interesting example of this that plays out in this regard in the adult fantasy community, particularly on BookTube, and it has to do with Robin Hobb’s epic series, The Realm of the Elderlings. It’s hugely popular in fantasy circles, and I consider her work one of the best examples of immersive POV in the genre–particularly the editions devoted to the series’ primary character, Fitz. Most newer BookTubers are 20-somethings, and many are newly experiencing the adult side of the genre, fresh off of years of reading YA fantasy. When they see the popularity of Hobb, and try it, many of them are put out, flummoxed, or even annoyed. “Nothing happens!” they lament. “It’s just this dude thinking about stuff.” Sometimes they say things like, “Fitz makes such stupid decisions!”
I understand that taste in fiction, even among fantasy readers, is highly subjective. And some (many?) will never enjoy Hobb. But more often, those that hang in there, or try again later in their reading journey, come around. You see their “aha moment” playing out. Coming from the very heavy plot-driven, fast-paced YA side of the genre, they need to find the patience and willingness to seek empathy in order to enjoy Fitz’s life, very much from his immersive perspective.
I agree with you about selecting the interesting–or even arresting–aspects of perspective, especially during action sequences. I often think of your lesson from The Emotional Craft, about picking the third thing a character experiences as a scene plays out. I think that helps to find that interesting or arresting aspect.
Although I’m delighted by it, I have to confess that I’m surprised by how the first few reviews of The Severing Son describe it as “fast-paced.” I’ve never felt overly concerned with speeding the pace. I think it has to do with narrative distance, and experiencing the story from the characters’ perspective. I was honored by a recent Goodreads reviewer saying: “The pacing is perfect, it’s fast and relentless and the action is handled as well as I’ve ever read before, bone crunching and visceral, the descriptions have you almost believing you’re there fighting in the mud and the guts.”
From a certain perspective (heh), the sentence nearly contradicts itself by mentioning the pace as relentless, and the descriptions being immersive (and therefore likely not brief). I think that has everything to do with what you’ve been teaching me for years. So thanks.
Does that sentence in that Goodreads review contradict itself, or is it in a way making the same point that I’m making today? Inner and outer work together. Indeed, handled well the inner content–especially in an action sequence–can lend a greater sense of forward story movement than flashing swords, mud and guts.
As I read this, I thought of two people in a dance (this a metaphor for narrative distance)…for sometimes writers need to work in steps, to get a feel for the partner, the characters, the movement of the story..but as you advance, the writer in this dance can pull the partner in, the story so close you are hearing breathing, smelling the story in a different way. Yes, the examples you provided are a kind of fiction I do not write. But in every story, writers want to pull the reader close, to startle with emotion and action. It might take some pages, maybe even chapters, as we develop the skill to breathe on the reader, pull them in. Like the characters you presented, readers WANT to get up close, to have their senses wide open…and it doesn’t take knives and guns to to this. The best weapon is emotion.
“The best weapon is emotion.” I would say “tool”, but yes. But not just any old emotion: one that surprises, intrigues, and takes the reader on an unexpected if brief emotional journey of their own. Blunt emotions have a blunting effect. Unexpected emotions draw us deeper in.
The intimacy in a novel or short story, with a well-written immersive POV, is, to me, the ultimate experience of story. It’s the reason I like books more than movies or plays. It’s the ultimate communication – to share how another person’s mind is working. That’s something unique to fiction, I think? My husband and I have been married forever, and yet, at least once a week, one of us will be mystified by how the other one thinks. LOL. But in an immersive novel, I am inside someone’s head. And when that head processes a thought the way I do, that feels as intimate as a kiss. That’s a connection forever. I’ll read all that author’s books, and I’ll never forget that novel.
So, my main enjoyment of writing is when I can go full-tilt immersive. I want to write the type of story I love to read. I hear you, though, that the best writing is a balance. That is something I need to remember. And also that, no matter what, everything is a surprise/unexpected to the reader.
Even though I love writing immersive, I can’t do it well for a character that I don’t yet understand. In the first drafts she’ll (it’s always a woman) keep her thoughts from me. Clues come out in the dialogue then.
Thank you for the post. It feels like, like everything in life, always strive for a balance for the best result, but throw in something unexpected to keep it interesting.
This is telling comment: “My main enjoyment of writing is when I can go full-tilt immersive…” That suggest to me that you are writing the way ot because it’s necessarily and always the best way to go on a given page, but because it’s your preference. It’s easy, natural and enjoyable for you.
For what it’s worth, readers sometimes need to visualize what’s happening and/or to have space to feel something of their own. Give them that room once in a while, even if it works against your personal enjoyment. That’s my advice.
I had to read this post twice, there’s so much in it to get. Wonderful! Just to be clear about the degrees here, immersive POV is the same as deep POV. But immersive POV is an enhanced close POV? Is that correct? What if we are in third person and not first person as your examples show? We normal use italics in the present tense in third person to express the exact thoughts the character is having in that moment on the page. Don, could you speak to how italics might play into immersive third person POV?
Geez, Paula, got any questions? LOL. My worry about first person is that it feels automatically intimate–to the writer. But it isn’t always as immersive as imagined for readers. The same principle of surprise applies both in first- and third-person narration. This is a big topic, worth more discussion.
As to italics, those used to be the way to convey what characters are thinking in their heads, but I see that less and less in contemporary fiction. When we’re already sunk deep in a character’s experience of things, is there any need to set off a thought in italics? I don’t think so. In any event, not one is complaining, “Hey, what happened to all the italics, I can’t follow what’s going on…who’s thinking what I just read?” We’re accustomed to immersive POV.
I really set myself up for narrative distance hard mode– my POV character has PTSD, and he’s either deeply over-experiencing events (especially memories) or dissociating entirely. How to make the dissociation still feel immersive? Oh crud…
As a suggestion, a state of detachment (dissociation) is by itself an experience. That experience can be brought alive, too. What does your POV character *feel* about lacking feelings? (Or having too many?) If you see what I mean.
Once again, I feel like you have been snooping over my shoulder. I just started a new project (new novel, new series). This is the most immersive I’ve gone, and the mouthy, opinionated protagonist wants to be written in the first person. (All my novels so far have been in third.) It has a different feel to my other works, which is scary and exciting. I’m hoping the new series appeals to more readers while not disappointing my existing readers
A good novel is a good novel. I don’t ever see readers comment, “Ah, I was really into that writer, but I dunno…her latest book, she switched into the first person and that did it for me, I’m done with her.” Seriously, have not seen that ever!
Hi, Don:
I was having similar reflections recently while reading ON JAVA ROAD by Lawrence Osborne. The story is about two friends, a fiftyish British journalist (the narrator) and a Hong Kong millionaire of similar age. The two met in college in England and developed something of a rich boy-poor boy connection that has survived over the decades. But now Hong Kong is falling under Communist Chinese rule, students are rioting in the streets, and the millionaire is foolishly having an affair with one of the students, herself a (rebellious) child of privilege.
The book grabbed me first simply by its descriptions of post-independence Hong Kong, but that was inseparable from descriptions of how that affected people of wealth — and the narrator himself. For example here, the narrator and his wealthy friend are in the middle of a heated discussion about what the millionaire intends to due once the Communists gain complete control:
“But I’m not going to live under those cretins. On the bended knee and all that. Not a chance.” On the bended knee with a fat silver spoon rammed down one’s throat: it wasn’t the end of the world. More than that, it was in many ways attractive. What will people endure simply to obtain a bit of security and stability? Almost anything. It depends what their greatest fears are. But in any case the bended knee was hardly a uniquely Chinese phenomenon. Who did not bend the knee in the West? With a bit more fuss and noise, but ultimately bending the knee to capitalism in exchange for health, safety, and a long life. In fact, millions dreamed of having a silver spoon rammed down their throat while bending the knee. It was their Utopia! Jimmy got worked up, managing to snarl as he talked, like a Punch puppet.
Without saying it out loud, the narrator has made it clear his friend’s protestations are at best insincere. There are similar insights into how easily, in fact, the Hong Kong elites will make the transition to Communism, seeing it as merely a continuation of the great imperial tradition; reflections on the declining merit of Western journalism (with a number of expatriate journos making peace with Xi’s China and denouncing America as decadent and hypocritical); and a scathing comparison of young Western rebels (e.g., the Sex Pistols) who despite their “No Future” mantras always knew they had somewhere to go in the years ahead — a ranch in Colorado, a beach house in Costa Rica — whereas the Hong Kong youth realized their dreams for the future would be crushed under Communist rule.
But none of this was mere narration for narration’s sake. It was always the journalist’s reflections taking place as he was engaging with his millionaire friend, others in his circle, the rebellious young love interest, or simply the changing nature of the places he had come to love over then years. This anchored the descriptions of this fascinating foreign world in the questioning intelligence of a man with few illusions about himself, his life, or the world around him. Far from it slowing down the pace — the change in his internal understanding of himself, his friend, and Hong Kong was the story.
But I think this also points out why many writers fear “getting messy and personal.” It isn’t just introverted shyness or good manners; it’s fear that our thoughts and impressions just aren’t that interesting. So we stick to the tantalizing surface, moving things briskly along, hoping the reader won’t notice the lack of depth.
BTW: new whiskey for you to try: Cooper’s Daughter, bourbon finished in black walnut syrup barrels.
P.S. To bring the point home about the story being about how the narrator’s self-awareness changes over the course of the book, that change is foreshadowed in its early pages:
Jimmy gave me a copy of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, which his father in Hong Kong had in turn given to him when he was fourteen. Therein was the observation, well known to anglers over the centuries, about the sadistic use of frogs as bait: “Use him as though you loved him, that is, harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live the longer.” You could see why a ruthless billionaire father would give such a book to his son, and why Jimmy would carry it around with him as he went to study among England’s lazy elite. At the time, however, he simply said that it was the wisest book he could imagine for learning how to live, since life really was like fishing. It required patience, cunning, and an ability to sit still for long periods, paying attention to unmoving waters. It encouraged a taste for quiet killing.
A short time later, the narrator reflects on their conspicuous difference in social station and wealth, and yet their enduring friendship despite that chasm:
I like to think he felt sorry for me; maybe he did. Or else I was the frog with a hook in its mouth and he was the one harming me as little as possible.
As for quiet killing — well, I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone.
Cooper’s Daughter…check.
And yes, as human’s we’re afraid of letting it all hang out, like our innermost selves will be somehow repellent. In fiction, the effect is the opposite. When characters don’t hold back, neither do we. We connect.
Good afternoon, Don. This is a post I’m going to go over and over as I finish the Afghan story.
“It’s also not accurate, either, to think that if characters’ thoughts and feelings are conveyed in nuanced detail that readers will be left with nothing of their own to feel.”
I had a fascinating reaction from a beta reader recently. Immersed Claire’s POV (or so I thought) the reader was freaking out that the wedding at the warlord’s compound was going to be destroyed by a drone attack SIMPLY because Claire wasn’t present. I asked what the reaction to Claire’s turmoil affected her, and the response was that her “guilt” was so small compared to what was happening that it increased the tension she felt. The reader wanted Claire to hurry up and get to the wedding and effectively by her presence stop the drone. I was surprised, and I’m taking a hard look at that scene to hopefully learn how and why it had that impact. Ww2
In essence, the reader reacted and was horrified by what was going to happen while Claire was dilly-dallying.
Wish we could have had this post before Surrey, however, this is precisely what I needed broken down and exactly what I’m going to work on in this draft.
Thank you, thank you!
I appreciate the beat reader who didn’t want that drone strike to happen, and for Claire to prevent it, but horrible things happened in Afghanistan. Worse things are happening now. Maybe the solution lies in why Claire delays?
Once you get it, though, it is the most natural way to write, removing the narrator completely, and just letting a reader BE each of your pov characters.
You provide the perfect amount of inner/outer tentatively, experimenting until it feels more like channeling a character than writing one.
I don’t see how you can ever go back.
I think you’ve grasped it: there’s a balance and part of the reason is that sometimes readers need space and sometimes they want to delve.
Glad you address this topic, Don. I did not know it had a name–immersive POV. I’ve always urged my editing clients to create varying degrees of this POV, depending upon their genre and on how much to use based on where they are in the dramatic arc. Yet, I find teaching, even offering examples from published authors, doesn’t always get through compared to taking a scene from their own writing and adding the immersive elements for them–and then they get it.
Great exploration of a complex concept that I also see writers wrangling with. I agree that plunging readers directly into a characters’ experience can add great visceral intimacy, and that it has to be balanced with action, plot, forward momentum. It can be a hard balance to strike, and you nicely explain how to translate what is so instinctive and natural in real life onto the page–great,punchy examples too.
This article and discussion amazes me. Just when I think I know something about writing a novel realize there’s so much still to learn. Will definitely reread.
One month later, I’m circling back to this column and marveling at how much useful information and wise instruction is packed into it. Immersive POV is shifting and shimmering like an oasis in the distance. Can I grasp it? Outer mode comes to me more naturally. I love dialogue. Plot. Action. Ideas I can show on the page. Inner mode takes more effort for me to discard the obvious thoughts and feelings and search for something that’s surprising yet still fits my characters. Inner mode serves my story better when I want to show something that may seem ordinary or mundane if it’s presented in outer mode. Inner mode allows it to feel fresh and surprising. But then, immersive POV should make something that may seem ordinary or mundane feel fresh and surprising in outer mode too. Because it’s not the mode that matters, right?