Hello and welcome! Don’t let Munchkin fool you — what runs through her head is elevator music. But she’s a darling, so there’s that? Her sister is either a purring, drooling monster, or is nails on chalkboard panic, with no in between.
Which is what I wanted to talk about tonight. Feelings.
Close POV and Interiority
What makes narrative distance? A hard question from the start. In either 1st or 3rd POV, you can have close or distant narration. Yes, even in 1st. You can have most of the character’s thoughts and feelings sequestered away, or you can put your reader into their skin. It’s all part of how you do interiority — and in a work with multiple POVs, that interiority is a lot of what can help you distinguish your characters, without even having to use their names.
There’s a few parts to this. The easy one is the character’s motivation and biases and life experiences. What sort of metaphors would they use, what would they notice, what do they dismiss. Instead, we’re going to look at the harder side.
How do they feel?
What’s even more fun is that there are two different ways to answer this question.
Emotional feelings: Are they worried or angry? Do thy have a perspective built around hope, or around competition, or around despair? Who brings them joy, who makes them fear? Get into the feelings not just in stating them, but in word choice and nonverbals. How do they get angry or sad, or frustrated? People want to connect, and interiority and feelings that the reader can share is a big way to make that connection.
Physical feelings: The other side of this is how their body feels.
I just went for a run tonight. I hate running, for a lot of different reasons. One is that I’m out of shape. Another is that I have tendon damage in my knee. That means that what I feel when I run is going to be wildly different than Usain Bolt or anyone else. I taste tin when I get going for a while. I can feel my breathing becoming more harsh, and the ache in my knee if I’m running too long. I notice the way running on asphalt is more jarring to my joints than on dirt or a nice springy track, I have wisps of hair that love to get into my mouth. And the bugs. Ah, the joys of running at sunset and eating gnats on the way.
On the other hand, I love swimming. The cool water, the way I feel like I’m lengthening as I take the strokes, the blessed silence as everything else slips away, the sense of floating. The gentle burn in my shoulders and thighs. Even the tang of chlorine makes me happy because despite what it does to my hair, I love to swim. All of it has to do with how I sense my world around me and how I sense my own body.
Putting things together
The physical sensations you emphasize can also make emotions more vivid. Some people notice their heartrate, or the impending migraine as a vise catches them at the temple. Others will feel warmer when they’re flirting or when they’re angry. Fear can bring chills along our skin or make us breathe more quickly.
Combining the two methods of feeling is immensely effective and can create a sense of who the person is and a sense of living in their body and perspective. SenShoe talked a lot about how to immerse a reader, you need to evoke at least three senses. We think about taste and smell, vision and sound… but feeling is a lot more complicated because it’s touch and emotion, it’s external and internal.
To shorten the narrative distance, make the reader feel like they ARE the character.
Is this always wanted?
No! Writers choose their narrative distance, and different types of writing call for different distances — and different themes and intents will as well. So if you want to make your narrative distance further, then decrease the amount of interiority you’re giving to your POV character. Interiority will help a reader feel like the POV character. Narrative distance will engage a reader more intellectually than emotionally.
Both are valuable, but the difference is key.
Happy writing!
Challenge: Put your character in someone else’s shoes. How does it feel? How do they feel?
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