In a post on Writer Unboxed, Donald Maass writes about narrative distance and the difference between straight POV and immersive. “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,” he explains. “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.”
One challenge is that the narrative added by a close POV feel extraneous. But how much it too much? Writers worry that too much interiority will slow the pace of their story. That might be the case sometimes, but Maass says a larger issue is at work: the level of character intimacy that writers are comfortable with.
Do you want readers to intuit what your character is experiencing or do you want to bring them directly into your character’s thoughts? “In one approach, readers are sure to see the story vividly,” Maass writes. “In the other approach, readers are certain to understand what characters in the story are going through.” Maass says that great novels do both, provided the writer understands the purpose of each tool and how to utilize it.
Writing in “outer” mode is more than mere reportage. The words you choose, your sentence flow, and your imagery convey a lot about your characters. In contrast, liberal use of interiority does not limit the reader’s imagination or intuition. Rather, the reader reacts to what’s on the page.
So when do you dive deep and when do you skate along the surface? If your scene is action oriented, interiority may seem out of place. If your scene is pensive or reactive, you might decide to go deep into your character’s thoughts. However, Maass says these assumptions are misleading. Instead, your choice has less to do with the current scene and more to do with surprising your readers. “Readers may see more vividly when they feel something they don’t expect,” he explains. “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.”
According to Maass, the success of narrative distance is balance. Near and far are inseparably mixed and waiting for you to use them effectively. Maass examines some contemporary noir stories to show how their writers handled a mix of narrative distances.
Maass shares examples from S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, which swaps POV between two men whose sons are murdered; and Gabino Iglesias’s The Devil Takes You Home, the story of an immigrant, Mario, whose little daughter is dying of leukemia.
Maass says beginning writers often take one of two extreme paths: avoiding the personal by staying aloof or overdoing it with too much detail. However, this conflict exists only in our heads. “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,” Maass writes. “There’s room for both. Even more, I would say that there’s a need for both.”
