Keeping Your Distance: Narrative Distance

I talked a little about narrative distance on Monday, but I thought it might be worth a deeper look today, especially for those who are trying to deepen or widen their POV during revisions. Narrative distance is that feeling of closeness (or lack thereof) between the reader and the characters. There's no right narrative distance, and it' up to the writer to decide where they want the reader to be. But it's easy to fall into that "limbo narrative" (thanks to CE for coining the phrase) where it isn't really clear where your narrator is.

There are some common words help determine narrative distance. If you're unsure where your narrator is, or want to get close or farther away, here are some samples of things to search for:

Stage Directions
These are the little words like "to" and "for" that imply motive. In a close POV, you show the action and let the reader figure out the motivations by what's said and done. A more distant POV might tell those motivations.

Close Distance:

The zombie lunged through the open window. Oh crap! Bob grabbed the shogun and pulled the trigger. 

Jane bit back a frustrated scream. There was never a shotgun around when you needed it. She spotted an axe hanging behind the bar. That'll do. 

Far Distance:

Bob reached for the shogun to blow the zombie's head off. Oh crap! he thought, and pulled the trigger.

Jane ran for the axe hanging behind the bar. She realized there was never a shotgun around when you needed it.

Emotional Signposts
These are words like: felt, thought, sensed, believed, realized, ignored. They explain to the reader what the narrator is thinking or feeling instead of showing actions that let the reader figure out these things. Now, there's a difference between a distant narrator and telling, though it can be a subtle thing. You fall more into telling when you rely on the explanation to convey the information, and do nothing in the text to back that up. It's also more told when there's no sense of a narrator to those explanations, juts the author filling in the gaps.

Telling: Jane sensed the zombie just beyond the edge of the light. They'd found her.
Showing:  Jane sensed the zombie just beyond the edge of the light; a presence in the darkness, a lurking hunger, she wasn't sure what it was, but her body knew. They'd found her.

Telling: Bob ignored the warning signs that zombies were close and went in anyway.

Showing: Bob ignored the warning signs: the shuffling feet, the scrapping, the smell. He went in anyway. 

Easy Explanations
These are words like: by, since, after, when, before. They're explaining the order of events from a distance because the narrator knows what happened. Or it's summing up a decision that the reader never gets to see the POV character make.

By the time Bob got to the gun, the zombie had broken through the door.

Since Jane was already on top of the dumpster, Bob ran for the Chevy Suburban.

When Sally came out of the house, then zombies charged at her.

Pitfalls of Narrative Distance
It makes it easy to tell instead of show, and claim you're just doing a far narrative distance. But if you decide on far, make sure the one doing the telling is a narrator, not the author poking in to explain things, even if that narrator is invisible. It's a subtle difference, but it makes a world of difference between a story that feels flat, and story that feels like someone is telling it. 

On the flip side, a close narrative distance makes it easy to throw in every single thing a character thinks and does, so the story bogs down. Even though you're close in your narrator's head, you don't have to show every last thing they think or do. You can summarize a bit or skip things entirely if they story reads better that way. It's all about balance.

Which Narrative Distance Do You Use?
It's just like POV. Whichever you prefer. It all depends on how close in the head of your narrator and POV you want the reader to be. The closer you get, the more focused what is seen becomes. The more personal and judgmental (as in, they judge what they see and have an opinion about it, not the snotty type).

ETA: You hear all the time about filter words and POV, and Juliette Wade did a fabulous post on this. A must read if you really want to get this concept.