Area II
Narrative Distance & Point of View
How close the reader stands
Every narrated sentence sits at some distance from its subject. The camera can hover at a historian's altitude or press so close it dissolves into raw thought. Naming that distance—and moving it on purpose—turns point of view from an accident of drafting into an instrument.
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Psychic Distance
Gardner's 5-level scale
Set the exact felt gap between the reader and a character's mind, from 1 to 5.
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Free Indirect Discourse
Unattributed interior voice
Fuse third-person narration with a character's own thoughts—no “she thought” tags.
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Internal Focalization
Single-perceiver filter
Restrict every detail to what one viewpoint character can perceive in real time.
Example from this area
From Psychic Distance—Set the exact felt gap between the reader and a character's mind, from 1 to 5.
| Level | Example rendering |
|---|---|
| 1 | It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped from the train. |
| 2 | Henry Carter stepped down from the train into the cold. |
| 3 | Henry hated winters like this; the cold cut straight through him. |
| 4 | God, how he loathed the cold. Why come north at all? |
| 5 | Cold. Cold everywhere. Get inside. Move— |