Orchestrating the "Four Cardinal Distances" of storytelling will shore up the foundation of your story.
You've got a unique story, intriguing characters, a thrilling plot...yet somehow the foundation of your almost-amazing piece feels "off." Before going right to tactical or structural fixes, turn your attention to what I've dubbed the Four Cardinal Distances of Storytelling. Learn to juggle these in your writing and you'll have conquered the last bastion of irresistible storytelling.
PSYCHIC DISTANCE
Closely related to POV, psychic distance dictates the level of intimacy between the narrative voice and the characterological voice. If the story is being told from a great distance, the narration will likely be written in a distant, or omniscient third-person POV. If the narration is close, the POV is likely first-person or a close third-person. There are instances, however, where the POV can be close on the protagonist, while remaining narratively distant from her.
Pro Tip: If the psychic distance is consistently close throughout the story—that is, if the close-third narration lives right inside the protagonist—the narration will never know what the protagonist doesn't know.
TEMPORAL DISTANCE
Otherwise known as a narration's"Vantage Point" temporal distance tells us about what point in time in the narrative present or future a story is being told—regardless of POV or tense. A narrator from the future has perspective on what has happened in the story, although we have yet to read it.
Pro Tip: If you're writing from a vantage point in the future, be strategic about where you insert narrative reflections. Too many passages featuring a learned voice from the future—as old and wise as that voice may be—might pull the reader out of the narrative present, and therefore out of the story.
PHYSICAL DISTANCE
A close cousin of psychic distance, physical distance is a no-brainer that somehow still stumps even experienced writers now and again. If you're close on a character, follow her movements and refrain from giving us images she can't see, smells she can't smell, knowledge she shouldn't be able to access. If she's walking to the shore under cover of storm clouds, there's no way she has eyes on the brilliant lavender light kissing the tops of those clouds. She's a woman walking on the beach, not a pelican flying over the sea.
If she's walking to the shore, she can't see the brilliant lavender light kissing the tops of the clouds. She's a woman walking on the beach, not a pelican flying over the sea.
Pro Tip: Even if you're writing from a distant, omniscient third-person POV, be sure to manage the movement of the character's body from place to place so the reader can track her whereabouts within a single setting, and between settings in the same scene. If she's walking on the beach in one paragraph, don't put her inside the house playing with her dog in the next—without giving us a transitional sentence or two of her walking back to the house, opening the door, and greeting the dog. Think of it this way: An omniscient narrator might be able to see all, but he is not a time traveler; he is not a master of temporal distance. He's with the character in scene, and needs to shepherd her from one place to the next in order to keep the reader inside the four walls of the story.
NARRATIVE DISTANCE
I like to think of narrative distance as "story knowledge," the subtlest of the Four Cardinal Distances. The story—not the narrator but the narrat-ive—always knows what the story's really about, the thematics, the big-picture, the gut feeling it wants to leave you with. The characters, however, and in some cases even the narrator, aren't aware of the Big Message. Being aware of narrative distance allows you to play with how obvious or subtle you are with your Big Messages.
Literary fiction tends to play it cool, claiming thematic ignorance and letting the reader infer the subtext.
Pro Tip: Fairytales are often incredibly close, narratively speaking; that is, the narrator knows exactly what the moral of the story is going to be—she's itching to tell it! Be careful what you wish for! Slow and steady wins the race! Literary fiction tends to play it cool, claiming thematic ignorance and letting the reader infer the subtext and puzzle together what's really happening behind the scenes.
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