Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Understanding and establishing distance
Influential point of view
Speech, voice, and point of view

It’s important to determine the authorial distance you’ll use in a story. For instance, the narrator can be very much involved in the point of view, offering opinions about the character, his lifestyle, the culture or community he belongs to, or not be involved at all and have the narration told completely from the character’s perspective.

DEFINITION

Authorial distance is how much the narrator intrudes on the story and the character’s point of view.

Authorial distance can be as close as the narrator revealing the character’s actual thoughts (“He thought, What in the hell do I do now?”) or be completely distant from the character, as a journalist might be while writing a newspaper article (“On June 14, 1979, the Morgans departed LAX at precisely 3:15 P.M.”).

Depending on the type of story you’re telling, decide how much or how little authorial distance is needed for your story. If you begin writing from a distant authorial distance, such as the previous example, the next sentence should continue to move toward the individual character, his thoughts, and his feelings. You might not want to be so close that you reveal his actual thoughts, but you do want to establish the third person POV for your protagonist. Once you’ve established point of view, maintain the level of authorial distance you’ve chosen.

Remember, don’t slip from third person once you’ve established it. If you’ve chosen third person limited omniscient POV, don’t slip into omniscient POV by revealing the thoughts and feelings of other characters who are not your protagonist.

After you’ve written the story, put it away. When you return to it to review it again, you’ll be able to look at it with fresh eyes. With a pen, mark moments in the story where you’ve slipped from third person or switched authorial distance without justifiable cause. Be aware of this happening in your fiction, and make whatever corrections you need.

If you’ve noticed many slips in your story, you might want to determine whether the point of view or level of authorial distance you’ve chosen needs to be re-evaluated or even modified to fit your narrative goals.

The least you need to know

·  Point of view is the way the events of a story are conveyed to the reader; it’s the vantage point from which the narrative is passed from author to the reader.

·  First person point of view uses I or we.

·  In second person point of view, the narrator tells a story to another character using you.

·  Third person point of view uses pronouns such as he or she.

·  Whatever authorial distance you choose to employ, be consistent with that distance.