Let’s cast our writing in cinematic terms. The reader’s “mind’s eye” is the screen. Your words are the camera, defining scenes, controlling distance from the subject, focus, lighting, and angles.
I’ll address two “camera” concepts: I. Physical Distance and II. Emotional Distance. Then I’ll close with III. A Combination Example. I’ll offer examples from my own writing.
But first, consider the writing of scenes, the basic building blocks of how we tell a story. In film, a scene is generally thought of as action in a single location and continuous time. But for written work – such as stories, novels, history, documentaries, memoir, poems, and movies – a scene also requires a beginning, middle, and end; and it needs an intended purpose to support plot, characterization, setting, or mood.
Always think and write in scenes, and for each scene you create, ask:
Question: What do I intend my audience to feel and see? A reader must feel and see something. But what?
Answer: We want the reader to feel the gut experience of our Point of View (POV) character and see meaningful images in the mind’s eye.
I. Physical Distance
In crafting film, every camera shot is from a deliberately chosen distance from the action, character, or setting. The same is true when sentences on the page create scenes. Imagine a movie in which an opening scene contains these three distance choices.
- 1. Begin with a long shot. Perhaps of a Florida beach or a cabin in the valley. The view is panoramic, centered on a distant focal point.
- 2. After the long shot, your camera may zoom in, perhaps to a middle view of a couple walking on that beach or to an old man in a rocking chair on the porch of that cabin.
- 3. Then the camera – your words – might zoom to a close-up, suggesting meaning or intrigue. The couple may be holding hands, watching a child jump in the surf. Perhaps the old man is stretching a trembling hand towards the busted neck of a banjo, just out of reach on the weathered porch floor.
These examples suggest ways to use distance choices to build a scene cinematically in our written pieces. The filmmaker directly projects images on a literal screen, but we use evocative language to conjure sensory responses in the reader, who draws conclusions based on our precise juxtaposition of images.
We have three elements at our disposal to elicit those responses: action (creates forward movement), dialogue (brings story to life), and narration (provides depth). And all the while, we are making physical distance decisions.
The Credits are rolling: For every scene, you-the-writer must function as set designer, stage manager, director, dramatist, and mood-musician. If writing in first person, you’re also the actor. And you do all this without visual and audio tools. Later, you may also function as reader, critic, and editor.
II. Emotional Distance (Closeness)
Consider your reader’s experience in terms of distance from your POV character’s inner state.
I’ll consider narration now. You might later apply the following ideas to your other two elements, action and dialogue:
- 1. With long view narration, you as author may show actions, body postures, and gestures as seen from outside the person. She pivoted on the barstool, her gaze on the door.
- 2. With an intermediate distance narration, you may show the character’s unspoken thoughts and questions, perhaps including body sensations to project specific emotion. Her eyes narrowed, lips curled in a shadow of disgust; no way in hell would she be alone with that scumbag.
- 3. Using close narration you can present directly to the reader the character’s deepest yearning, inner feeling, fear, even her ruminations about how these came to be or how they may be changed/accomplished. Here the reader and the narrator are one with your POV character. Perhaps your character feels one way but says the opposite out loud: There was no way in hell I’d risk being seen with that scumbag, I thought. But I smiled at his mother and told her, “I’d love to.”
The closeness (emotional or physical) of your narration is, in my opinion, independent of whether you are writing in first, second, or third person.
Close narration may be augmented by using knowledge of personality types, such as either the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or Enneagrams (as discussed on Mary Bast’s WAG blog), which may provide ideas for developing characters’ inner thoughts and motivations.
Another way to move in close is “free indirect discourse,” which dispenses with attributions (e.g., “she said” or “he thought”). Here’s a third person example, beginning with a long view, moving in close:
Danielle slapped Jimmy and rushed toward the door. Jimmy grabbed something small and hard to throw, but the door had slammed. He gazed at the ashtray. How’d this stupid thing get here? Wait a minute … these little blue glass-bumps … just like Granny’s ash tray. Stolen, what, maybe ten years ago? Jimmy crumples to the floor. Behind closed lids, he witnesses Granny’s ransacked parlor, through his once again eight-year-old eyes.
The free indirect discourse part began at the question “How’d this stupid thing get here?” Note: I even switched from past to present tense, once we’d gone interior. Does it work for you? If not, how would you change it?
Working with distance can help you produce effects and emotions usually created in film using music, lighting, slow fades, sound effects, etc.
III. A Combination Example
I’ll close here in the voice of a child (Paul, in my book Wrestling God), morphing from first person to a semblance of second and from past tense to present, varying the physical and emotional distance:
I hid behind Mama. Our family’s fireworks were ruined. Across the lawn, Dad turned off the hose. He waved an arm for us to follow. His eyes stayed locked ahead. We traipsed over to the Bentleys’ yard. They let me light a rocket, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wandered on back home, felt my way down the dark hall and crawled into bed still in my pants. I got to sweating.
I kept thinking of my babysitter Alma, with her friends all happy on graduation night. It was in the paper. She was sixteen and got killed by a kid driving drunk. I had to go to the funeral with my necktie too tight. Her daddy slipped out before it was even over. I saw wet streaks in his wrinkles.
Afterwards, Alma’s folks had people over. It was one of those things where the cars park all up and down the road, and people keep bringing food and looking at you and your head’s numb and your ears ring, but ladies keep coming in, making high-heel noise on the floor. They give hugs that last too long. Tables fill up with food. Somebody brings fried chicken, but you don’t feel like eating. You sit on the front porch swing with her sister who doesn’t cry but pets your hair and scratches behind your ears. You almost smile, but the cat is batting at a dead spider, and you remember going to the county fair and riding the Ferris wheel with Alma, eating cotton candy, and on this very swing she kissed your forehead and she was your baby-sitter, but now she’s dead and you don’t know what to say.
