Narrative distance
Hi, friends.
I hope you are well as January comes to a close. On my walk this week, I saw three daffodils in bloom. A sign that spring will be here soon.
I’ve been thinking about narrative distance this week as I try and wrestle chapters of my novel into submission. The one I think works best in this section happens to be a summary chapter, the emphasis on telling rather than showing. It is a lot more distant than the chapters that surround it. Can I find a way to make it work? I sure hope so.
Too, I’ve been reading a book that is pretty frustrating in terms of narrative distance (among other things). We are so far away from the character, it’s difficult to connect with him. And yet, this seems to be the author’s intention. I do not like this book or this character. So why do I keep reading? Sometimes it’s useful to read things that don’t quite work…especially if we can identify why it’s not working. I was also using it for a bit of research. And in that regard it was helpful. But I’m only half way done and I don’t know how much more of my life I can give to it.
Story.
I found two readings today that I think use narrative distance to their advantage. Dan Chaon’s short story Big Me (which I just found and wish I’d read much earlier) and Brenda Peynado’s essay Swimming Lessons.
Craft tidbits.
Why might it be useful to adjust the narrative distance in your piece? You might want to include a bit more mystery. Or you might want to create more (or less) intimacy with your character and thereby your reader. You might need to make your character more (or less) aware of the world around them.
When reading Big Me, there is something of the narrator that we can relate to—the childlike desire to live in an imagined space where we have more control, some place more exciting (or safer) than our actual lives. We play, we pretend, we search for secrets and clues to try and make sense of events we don’t yet have enough experience to understand.
I don’t know how many of my childhood years took place in this imaginary city. By the age of eight I had become the Detective, and shortly thereafter I began drawing maps of the metropolis. By the time we left Beck, I had a folder six inches thick, full of street guides and architecture and subway schedules. In the real town, I was known as the strange kid who wandered around talking to himself.
Andy, of course, will take his Detective duties a bit further— sneaking into Mickleson’s house, convinced he is more invisible than he really is. This scene provides the primary tension within the story.
The lights were on at Mickleson’s house, a bad sign, but I moved forward anyway, into the dense and dripping shadows of his yard, the crickets singing thickly, my hand already extended to touch the knob of his back door.
But there is also a deeper tension running beneath the current of the story, in the version of events that Andy remembers and what his siblings do.
He doesn’t remember his mother driving into a tree. Or that his brother tried to kill himself. He doesn’t remember his father pulling a gun on the children and wanting to kill them.
The trauma has been blotted out. We’re told of Andy’s tendency to blackout well before we have the context with which to view it. As a child, they are a kind of time travel. And who wouldn’t want to block out some of the events of his childhood.
But there’s something more disturbing at work—admissions that we only get near the end of the story, the accumulation of lies that seem harmless at first. He invents a girlfriend to make his life seem more interesting to his father. But these lies take a darker turn.
I make excuses to my wife, when I say I am having dinner with a client when in fact I am tracing another path entirely—following a young family as they stroll through the park, or a whistling old man who might be my father, if he’d gotten away, or a small, brisk-paced woman who looks like Katrina might, if Katrina weren’t made up. How can I explain that I walk behind this Katrina woman for many blocks, living a different life, whistling my old man tune?
A first person narrative usually allows for explanation. Afterall, they’ve lived the experience. They know what has happened. And yet, Andy can’t explain his actions. There are chunks of time he can’t remember, absences he’s glad for.
Generally, a lack of detail / specificity is one way to create detachment. Though that isn’t the case in this book that I’m reading. In fact, we get too much detail, too many memories, too many spots that are overwritten, and these details where the writing tries to hard become a replacement for the character’s connection to the world. He’s kept at arm’s length, seemingly on purpose. He is the kind of character Jerome Stern identifies as a Weird Harold. Weirdness in and of itself isn’t enough to propel the story forward. A trap that Chaon carefully and skillfully avoids.
Peynado uses second person point of view in Swimming Lessons to create distance from the very beginning. You took swimming lessons. You nearly drowned. It’s not that we don’t get detail in the essay, it’s that the focus isn’t where we expect it to be. We expect the falling into the pool to be full of detail to capitalize on narrative tension. But Peynado describes it only through dreams that come later:
You walk on the bottom of the pool, adults’ legs kicking in the blue in a slow ballet, mica ground into the walls glittering and pockmarked. It’s like walking on the skin of the moon.
The version of events her father remembers is different:
he dove in, thinking you were already dead, grabbed you up by your arms. Everyone was yelling. Were you already dead? you want to know. Did someone have to use CPR? you ask. But no one remembers.
More detail is given to the beheading of the snake than the near drowning.
A water moccasin slides towards you. You kick to the steps just in time. Your father tells you to hold the screen door open while he brings the snake out on the grass, and then he lets you hold the pool net to shield him while he chops its head off with a rusty shovel, the gritty crunch of metal on the concrete walkway. The tail slithers wildly towards you without its head.
That headless tail is perfect metaphor for the writing process itself.
Sparks.
Use second person point of view to write about a memory. Be stingy with your details. Focus on the physical landscape instead of the interior.
Or. Both Big Me and Swimming Lessons have different versions of the truth. Both seem to be concerned with safety. Write a story or essay in which the main character’s memory is at odds with someone else. Perhaps one of them is “right” or perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between.
Revision. Consider how adjusting the distance of your piece might make more sense. How could you add or subtract details or emotional responses to create greater tension? How could a memory or lack of memory add to this effect?
Other tidbits.
As submittable has grown, it has gotten more difficult to wade through all the calls for submission. (Believe me. I just did it yesterday.) Chill Subs is a new database that is easier to search and has all the info right up front. Right now it only has about 75 magazines but is growing quickly.
There seem to be a lot of submissions right now with specific themes. Cheap Pop, open Feb. 1-15, is looking for pieces on the Environment. SubTerrain is open with a Wicked theme until Feb. 7. Fourth River is looking for Collaboration pieces until Feb. 15. And Fiction International is open with a Dream theme until Feb. 15.
Also, it seemed like a lot of agents opened back up for queries in the last week or two. So, if your manuscript is ready, now’s the time to fire up those emails. We’re cheering for you!
That’s it from here scribblers. Pencils up. Keyboards out. It’s a beautiful day to get some writing done~
Marsha