I have just completed the six-week Jericho Writers’ course ‘Self-Edit Your Novel’, led by Debi Alper and Emma Darwin. I cannot praise it too highly, as the teaching and critiques, individualised to my own Work in Progress, have led me to some big ‘aha’ moments.
One of the most important insights for me was a new understanding of the term ‘psychic distance’. Put simply, this means where the writer positions the reader in relation to the event described. In cinematic terms, the camera can view from far away or zoom right in, uncovering more and more detail the closer it gets. Similarly, words can show a scene from a distance, or else as moving into the action – and of course the writer has an advantage over the camera in being able to get right inside the character’s mind and heart, describing their thoughts and emotions.
John Gardner gave these examples in his seminal work The art of fiction, showing a continuum of five levels of psychic distance (PD) that each refer to the same event:
PD1 It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
PD2 Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
PD3 Henry hated snowstorms.
PD4 God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
PD5 Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul…
As you can see, PD1-2 are useful for setting the scene, giving the wider context, whereas PD4-5 bring the reader right inside the character’s internal response to the event. Pick up a favourite classic and you’ll often find that truly immersive writing ranges across the continuum. Then look at back at something you’ve written; are you prone to staying in the same narrow band of psychic distance? Would your reader better understand the world you’ve set your characters in, or the emotional impact of events on them, if you nudged the psychic distance in one direction or the other from time to time?
So here is your exercise: write a short scene, starting from the wide-angle distant shot, so the reader knows where they are and what kind of story to expect, moving closer and closer in small steps, until you finish inside the character’s unfiltered head. Flex those writerly muscles!
