Knob

Psychic distance

You might say: narrative distance, how close the camera is

How close the reader stands to a character’s mind. Gardner gives five steps, from a wide historical view to raw sensation.

What it does

Controls intimacy: close for strong feeling, far for overview and speed.

Ask

How close should we be right now, and why change?

Typical

5 levels (Gardner), from far to close

Trouble

Sudden jumps in distance jar the reader.

What to look for

1. A wide historical view
2. A line close to raw sensation
3. Distance changing between far and close

Catalogue: Level

• Level 1 (far): “It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.”
• Level 2: “Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.”
• Level 3: “Henry hated snowstorms.”
• Level 4: “God how he hated these damn snowstorms.”
• Level 5 (close): “Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul…”

Connections

• Controls: Immersion

Sources

1. At Sea Journal, The Unseen Plane Crash: Psychic Distance, Gardner definitionBy psychic distance we mean the distance the reader feels between himself and the events in the story.

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Psychic distance" (psychic-distance) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/fiction-writing/ against my project

Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.

An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal