Narrative distance part 2: WHERE THE CRYPTIDS FLED

Staying objective or getting close; and my real-life mentee, Mo Drammeh

Part of what happens every month when I sit down to write a mentor column is I realize there’s some aspect of what I want to say that I’m not sure how to articulate or that I straight-up still need to learn. This happened last month, when I started trying to organize my thoughts on the concept of narrative distance and everything you can accomplish with it when you’re telling a story of suspense. In that piece, I put it this way: “consider how much distance you want to put between the reader and those characters in order to best tell the story.” I started with easy basics: verb tense and first-, second-, and two types of third-person point of view: omniscient and limited. To keep the piece from ballooning, I left out an additional question to consider: is the narration objective, or is it subjective? And assuming it’s the latter, just how subjective are we talkin’? This is where we get to the heart of the matter.

But before I tackle all this, I’m going to pause for the story of how I learned the term narrative distance in the first place. 

On and off for over a year, I’ve mentored a young author named Mo Drammeh. Part of that mentorship took place through a program offered by Portland’s prestigious Telling Room. The program, which lasts for a bit less than a year, culminates in the publication of a short work: in Mo’s case, a novella, which we’ll get to soon. One day, back while Mo was drafting, one of the program teachers made a note in the working draft. Her note started: “There’s a term, narrative distance,” and I thought…wait, can I define narrative distance? The teacher, author Kathryn Williams, called it “the reader's perception of how close, or far, they (or the narrator) are to the character's consciousness.” 

You’re probably thinking “okay, yes, I knew that,” like I was, but I hadn’t actually spent time actively thinking about this concept before that moment. How close does this sentence bring the reader to the character’s consciousness, and do I like the answer to that question? Might I want a different distance? Kathryn went on to pull out three sentences of Mo’s work, each with varying distances, for him to compare for their effect on the reader. I had noticed this about Mo’s writing–that sections of it seemed intentionally cool and aloof, hovering somewhere above the characters, while others plunged into their heads and told their innermost thoughts. I just didn’t know what to call it. Narrative distance.

Perspective can be “objective” or “subjective”, and as a law school grad, these are words I’ve heard many times. Subjective narration is common, for great reason. To bring it back to Kathryn Williams’s way of putting it, it informs the reader of a character’s consciousness: his awareness and perceptions of himself, others, and his surroundings. How close the narration feels depends on the writing. With “deep” or “close” third person, for example, the narration is the character’s voice. There is no breathing space between the reader and the character who owns that perspective.

Objective narration, on the other hand, is uninfluenced by the narrator’s or any character’s personal opinions, thoughts, experiences, or emotions. Apparently, purely objective points of view are rare in modern fiction.¹ Come to think of it, I can remember reading an article once pointing out that an oft-used example of an objective point of view, the story “Hills Like White Elephants” by Hemingway, contains a couple of subjective descriptors.² But, a complete piece of writing can absolutely contain sentences and even whole sections that are strictly objective.

Objective writing has its place in stories of suspense, especially when it fits the tone and actually enhances the reader’s emotional experience.

Kathryn’s comment sparked a discussion that continued through my work with Mo as he finished the first draft of the novella, and I’m betting that conversation continued with his second reader, because I now hold the final book in my hands, and I can see what he’s changed.

My mentee’s book baby

As you might be able to guess by the title, WHERE THE CRYPTIDS FLED involves urban fantasy elements; it’s about two journalists who uncover a government conspiracy surrounding cryptids. That said, I wouldn't shelve this book in “fantasy.” If I categorized my shelves by genre rather than chaos, I’d put this one with horror. The scenes involving cryptids are generally gory, scary, creepy, unsettling. The “our world” side of the book takes place in an alternate United States where queer people, like the main character Cassie, are essentially outlawed. If “social justice horror” is a genre, that’s what this book is. 

There’s so much Mo did in this story that I love, but I’m going to focus on his use of varying narrative distances to build a certain kind of suspense: dread.

As evidenced by Kathryn’s comment, at first, the way Mo was changing the narrative distance throughout the story was questionable. To borrow an analogy Andromeda just taught me, if he were using a movie camera, he was staying too far away, and occasionally zooming in too close without warning. But as with any writing convention, once you learn the rules, you can decide to break them. In this case, the concern was that Mo was, at times, writing from too far away. Mo decided to keep his starting distance, but he learned to zoom in.³ 

Now, this is how the book opens:

Her name was Cassandra Byrne. She was an at-home birth, the old way, because by that point her mother and father were hard on money and couldn’t risk becoming debtors. When she entered the world, looking through the window, she knew the flaky autumn leaves on the trees and the amber sunset sky, and her uncle’s gentle touch.

Her name was Cassandra Byrne. She was six years old. The legislation was finally passed that made her illegal. She didn’t know that it was her existence, specifically, that made her a crime.

And so the opening section continues, summarizing Cassie’s early life: her first kiss with another girl, the discovery of the kiss, her forced medication, and her eventual expulsion from college for the “moral objectionability” of her “actions.” The first lines of each paragraph are cool and distant, as if delivered by a neutral, unfeeling observer. The later lines delve into Cassie’s mind, letting the reader bond with her. But Mo held firm to his idea that some of the lines in the opening needed to maintain that distance from Cassie, and reading them again, I felt the tone of the piece come through. This story is bleak; the world is judgmental and uncaring. Mo’s use of distance, rather than closeness, adds to the horror of the story: the dread I felt for Cassie. The distance actually enhanced the reading experience.

After the opening section, Mo moved into closer narration, although he kept some of that objective tone from the beginning: the one that says, “I see you, but I don’t care.” For example, in this early scene, Cassie and her partner Jess are driving in the woods at night.

Jess wasn’t scared of the dark, or she wouldn’t admit to herself that she was, but it was something about this place that was wrong. It was an apathetic environment. Anything could happen here. These woods wouldn’t care.

Here, Mo maintained the atmosphere while letting us into Jess’s head. We see her personality (she doesn’t want to be the kind of person who’s easy to frighten) and feel her terror at encountering a place that feels “apathetic.” This theme permeates the story–the apathy of environments, systems, and groups of people towards those who have been deemed inhuman or invalid. In that tiny snippet, he builds the horror of the story’s uncaring world, and he lets us experience it with Jess.

Re-reading Mo’s book has had me thinking about narrative distance all over again and noticing how I’ve used it in the novel I’m working on at the moment. To go back to my lit terms, most of my chapters are in limited deep third person past. But! There is one point of view that is fairly objective, now that I’m thinking about it. Like Mo did, I’ve been experimenting with with closeness and distance, seeing what each brings me in a given scene. I haven’t gone back to see if those scenes I wrote are textbook objective…I’m excited to analyze when the time comes to read what I’ve written.  

I just hope this story gets over the finish line, like Mo’s did yesterday.

Mo and a few of his biggest fans (brother Bex & mom Awa)

Do you nerd out this hard when you read other people’s writing? Have you ever thought so hard about a simple term that you confused yourself? If your life is a fever dream, who’s doing the dreaming? (See fn 2.)

1. See these quotes on Ursula K. Le Guin’s manual Steering the Craft.

2. Can I find this article now? No. Did I dream it? IDK, maybe. Maybe my life is one long fever dream Ernest Hemingway is having.

3. After reading a draft of this piece, Andromeda sent me this blog post on “psychic distance” (aka narrative distance) by Emma Darwin. She talks about different degrees of distance and moving down into the character’s head. It’s v good plz read.