Control the Camera’s Distance

Practice. Take one paragraph of about 100 words from your draft that carries an event, and rewrite it three times in thirty minutes. Far: summary or panorama, time compressed, no private thoughts. Middle: the moment as a scene, perceptions mostly external, with a thin layer of the character’s idiom. Near: inside the perception, in the character’s own phrasing, with no “she thought” or “he felt.” Read the original and the three rewrites aloud, and for each finish the sentence “The reader can judge ___ but cannot feel ___.” Then decide where the piece wants each distance, and where your draft chose by drift.

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” That first sentence of Virginia Woolf’s novel stands outside Clarissa. In the next the narration moves in, and “For Lucy had her work cut out for her” is Clarissa’s thought about her servant. “What a lark! What a plunge!” is her own exclamation with no quotation marks, and it opens a memory of Bourton at eighteen. A few lines later the camera swings outside again, “A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her,” a neighbor glancing at her on the curb. Then she is inside again, hearing Big Ben, thinking, “Such fools we are.” Nothing marks the moves but syntax and idiom.

John Gardner calls the distance a reader feels between herself and the events of a story psychic distance (The Art of Fiction). Every draft has it and few drafts decide it. Some drift, sliding without signal from an overview of the town into one person’s private panic; others never move because the writer settled into one voice. Summary, scene, interiority and panorama are positions along one range. Summary is the right distance for what the reader must traverse and not experience (65). Near, the reader tends to feel and agree; far, the reader is better placed to judge and to see what the character cannot, and Scrope Purvis’s glance gives the interior that follows a shape to push against.

Deliberate can also mean never moving. A history that goes from the sweep of a decade to one afternoon in a courtroom faces the same question of how close the reader should stand. Reportage held at a far distance can sound authoritative while hiding how much the writer saw.