Psychic Distance | How to Control Point of View

everyone its Jalen and I'm here today with another reading video today we're gonna be talking about psychic distance so I put up a poll on my channel asking what videos you wanted me to make and for me to talk about one of the options with psychic distance which is something I've been wanting to talk about for a while because I have an old blog post on it and your girl loves taking old blog posts and making them into videos because I have all the points already scripted out in a coherent manner and a lot of people commented saying that they didn't know what psychic distance was and I thought that that meant it would be a great term to cover in a great topic to touch on because it's one of the most useful things I've learned in my whole writing degree anyone who studied writing academically it's probably pretty familiar with the term and it's pretty helpful stuff it's a good it's a good one to know so first of all what is it because a lot of people said they didn't know so second distance is how close or far the narrator or the narrative is from the character and therefore how close or far the reader feels to the character so with a closed psychic distance your narrator and your and your character are completely merged that would be like a close first-person and with it the farthest psychic distance you could have would be an objective third person so the narrator and the character are completely separate entities and then of course you have a huge range of possibilities basically infinite in between those two points so why is this important basically if you don't know what psychic distance is it could be inadvertently pulling your psychic distance out when you don't want to you could have drastic jumps between psychic distance that are really jarring you want to be in control of your psychic distance because a lot of times writers new writers struggle with psychic distance being too far because they're just not really considering it and when the psychic distance is too far it can be really hard for the reader to connect to the character because we're not really getting access to the character in an intimate way so the more the closer your psychic distance is the more intimate the narrator is you could also see it as the closer the psychic distance the more subjective the narrative is and the farther the more objective that's why the far the psychic distance you can have is a straight up objective point of view with barely and is written an objective point of view but it's where the narrator doesn't even have access to the characters thought and it's only watching I did a little example this is kind of in the same format as the examples I would always get in school but I just wrote this one myself so I'm gonna read five different sentences and each one is the same sentence but just closer so first of all is it's 2019 and a man is walking his dog in the rain this is really objective nothing about this is really debatable it's 2019 that's a fact and the man is walking a dog in the rain like that's just completely objective nothing about that is really intimate we have no access to his thoughts we're just seeing him so second up to that would be salad Birkins led his retriever into the storm so now we've named him so it's a little more intimate because we know who the character is and same we've specified the dog so things are getting a little more specific and we're just a little closer it's still pretty objective though it's still pretty distant next up kind of a middle ground kind of almost a standard third-person cell hated the rain but his dog didn't seem to care so now it's getting more subjective because now we have some emotions and opinions he hated the rain that's a subjective opinion it's not objective it's something that we have to have access to his thoughts to know same about his dogs dog doesn't seem to care here he's making an assumption about his dog so we're starting to get more into his brain one closer would be damned Sal hated this weather so now it's starting to get voiture we used the word dam so were more in his head we're here in his unique language it's subjective he hates the weather and then finally a very close psychic distance would be frigid water drips out of my nose but Goldie doesn't seem to care as you can see now it's subjective and we're totally in his head it's first-person those are some examples of sight distance zooming in and generally the rule of thumb is the farthest you can ever be is what you start with so if you start really close you can't really get further but if you start really far you can zoom in the goal of psychic distance isn't necessarily to have the closest like a distance all the time even in just a regular narrative it's going to change because sometimes are gonna state something that's a more objective fact and then next you're gonna state something that's more subjective and that's a difference in psychic distance but what you don't want is for it to be farther than you're intending and what you also don't want is for there to be jarring skips in psychic distance so within the same piece you can shift the psychic distance in and out you don't want a jarring leap of psychic distance that can be really that can really interrupt the flow of the writing so for example frigid water drips out his nose but Goldie doesn't seem to care it's 2019 a man walks his dog in the rain we've started really intimately and then suddenly gone farther out and it's quite jarring especially when you're in the middle of a longer piece and you're kind of immersed in and then suddenly there's a really big skip and psychic mister the bulk of this video I'm gonna talk about psychic distance in different point of views and what that looks like but I wanted to start by talking about things that pull out the psychic distance a lot of these tend to happen in third person and first person is I mean it's closer it's a closer psychic distance than third person you can get very close in third person but you can't really get as close as first because it's like a distance is how close the narrative is to the character and with first person the narrator of the narrative is the character so first person is as close as you can go however that doesn't mean that you can't make some of these errors in first person these errors can also happen in first-person and they can actually be quite jarring at first person really weaken the point of view because there are things that are distancing a point of view that's trying to be inherently close there are some things that distance your point of view the first one is referring to your character in a distant way if we look at the example when we got closer we gave the character a name we named him Sal I don't know why I named himself that was just the name that came to my mind it would be weird if we named him and then later on we refer to him as the man like we did in the first the first sentence when I see people do a lot that's kind of a jarring point of view shift is refer to their character by like a title let's say that Sal's job was that he's a mailman so referring to him as the mailman or the tall man or something though that's really really distant because Sal isn't thinking of himself in that way I'm not thinking of myself like the youtuber or the writer in my own narrative that's really weird that's really distant only an objective point of view is really seeing me that way seeing Sal this way Sal is thinking of himself as I or he knows himself as Sal that's one that I see people do a lot especially new writers I think because it people worry that they're overusing a pronoun or overusing their characters name but really it's best to avoid those because they're super super distant and it can be kind of jarring because people don't think of themselves in that way so unless your point of view is really objective doesn't really make sense especially if you're jumping back and forth so if I refer to Salle's Sal in one sentence and he in the next sentence which that's fine that's equally as close and then in next sentence I refer to as the mailman that would be a big psychic distance shift so that's the first thing that shifts your psychic distance is how you refer to your character of course in first person you're pretty much always your friend to your characters always bringing this up as I but another thing that can pull out the psychic distance are filters I have an entire video on filters I will leave a link to that in the cards it's another really useful easy writing hack that you can implement filters are essentially is kind of when you put a little wedge between the character in their experience to keep using the example I've been using Sal heard rain hitting the pavement heard as a filter here so what that sentence could be instead would just be rain hit the pavement because we're in the South's point of view we know that anything stated in the narrative style is Excel is experiencing so we don't have to be told that he's hearing it I go more to this in my video so I won't really rehash filters yeah but they do distance the psychic distance and they're a pretty easy fix as well another thing that distance is the psychic distance and this one can be really jarring is showing things the protagonist doesn't know or wouldn't think this happens a lot in third-person pretty easy mistakes to make sometimes it can veer into head hopping for example you mentioned something that's happening in another room that your character doesn't know about or something your character just wouldn't think that distance is your point of view you see this a lot in omniscient point of views where it's done purposefully a great example of this is in The Book Thief the narrator here is an omniscient narrator and he frequently states things that the characters don't know because our narrator is omniscient it works here but let's say we were writing in a close third limited and we started stating things that the characters wouldn't think or don't know that really distance is the point of view and it's quite jarring and that's kind of a point of view error a lot of the time if you're writing in a limited point of view you kind of have to commit to that characters perspective and only show things that are within their experience I talked about this in my video on third-person but there is kind of a common misconception that in third-person the narrator is not the character the narrator is still very intricately tied to the character and third-person it's kind of just like a vessel that is attached to the character and has seen in experiencing what the character experiences so the next one this is kind of related to the first point but showing the character from an external viewpoint or the character talking about themselves in a way that they wouldn't think about themselves looking at your character in a way that it isn't how they perceive themselves so similarly it's like I said referring to yourself as the mailman but even things that your character wouldn't notice about themselves like if they described like what their hair looks like from the back they don't know that so let's say your character is walking down the street and they have some toilet paper stuck to their shoe kind of embarrassing but they don't know that there's 12 paper stuck to their shoe but the narrative mentions it that something the character doesn't know so it's distancing the psychic distance because now you're Kurt now your narrator's looking at the character rather than being there you can show that once the character realizes it but at this point in a limited point of view your cursor doesn't know that an omniscient narrator would know this an objective narrator would know this but a limited narrator or a first-person narrator would not the next thing would be using vocabulary or phrasing your character would not if you want a close psychic distance keep in mind words and phrasing and images that your character would know and use I think if you want more on this it would be helpful to check out my video on voice the next thing that can distance your point of view is direct thoughts so direct thoughts are when you're writing I mean people do this a lot in third-person I used to do it all the time my first book I wrote in third-person so many direct thoughts it kills me so direct thought is when you have a third-person narrative and then there are first-person thoughts and they're often written in italics or the thought will be in first-person and it will say he thought he thoughts being used as a filter so for example a direct thought would be I hate this weather Sal thought and stared out the window a way of phrasing that that would have been more eloquent and smoothly integrated would be he hated the weather South stared out the window basically when you put a thought in first person in your third-person narrative it's not technically incorrect but it's really drawing attention to the fact that there is a narrator and it's a really jarring shift in psychic distances because suddenly you're super close any time you draw attention to the fact that the narrator is separate from the character you are increasing the psychic distance I would suggest just avoiding direct thoughts basically always unless it's like a really like you have a really strong reason for it like a book that uses direct thoughts as part of the style distinctly it's a bad book don't read it my absolute darling but Gabriel Talent read that recently I really didn't like it for reasons that I won't get into but in that book it's in third person but the third person narrator is inherently separate from the main character and it was a case where it was done very purposely because any any time the main character thought suddenly her thoughts were so aggressive and vulgar that they would be separated and we would be told with a filter that she was thinking and then the narrative itself was much more low-key and mellow and floral and not really reflecting her worldview at all so that's a case where it was done very purposely to kind of separate to the character from the narrative a lot of the time if you want your psychic distance to be close and seamless you don't want to be using direct thoughts another thing that distances your point of view is with whole is withholding withholding emotions judgments sensory detail or just withholding the character's point of view the less you let your characters emotions and thoughts seep into the narrative and color the narrative the more distant your point of view can be this is one reason why a lot of the time people feel less connected to characters in third-person because the third person is done with a lot of withholding you're a third person and you're really conservative about what you share that comes directly from the character's mind your point of view can feel very distant because there's nothing subjective in it and the more subjective the closer we are so don't be afraid to withhold your characters feelings your character's thoughts and also sensory detail that they're experiencing you know if it's cold let them feel that if it's raining instead of just saying that it's raining let us feel the water like we hide in this example the character of feeling the water dripping down there now this really just comes back to let your character's personality steep into the narrative that will make your point of view closer and more Voisine and probably more interesting so now let's talk about psychic distance in different point of views and what it looks like because it does look different in different point of views so let's start with first person because it's kind of easiest in first person you're inherently really darn close because your narrator is the character now some people say that in third person you can get as close as you can in first person I disagree with that I think you can get almost as close but I don't think you can ever be as close in third person as 1st person because inherently first person that's what 1st person is now again closer is it always better and sometimes you want that distance and that's when 3rd person is really really useful when you want that just sliver of distance or the ability to control distance a little more with first person you're inherently gonna be right in their head and for some characters that doesn't really work well so as you can see 1st person is really simple the narrator is the character there's just there's no distance at all anything that's written on the page we can assume as the reader is coming directly from the character there's never really a question about it all the things I mentioned you should still consider because they can create kind of flaws in your voice or can be kind of technical bumps but you're inherently pretty darn close with second person it's hard to say exactly where second person fits into this some people say second person is closer some people say it's a little farther but it's very close to writing in the first person the psychic distance is almost the same and second person is kind of written in a technical matter very similarly to 1st person so yeah that's the first person pretty simple if you want to check out my video on writing first person I do have a video on that it's kind of old I haven't looked at in a long time I hope it's decent so then let's talk about third person objective now this is more just to illustrate the point of video because no one really writes in third-person objective I can't remember the last time I read something that was in an objective point of view probably never happens in novels maybe in short stories every once in a while but I never see it third-person objective means that your narrator is a camera they have zero access to the character's mind they're just kind of following them around like a camera so as you can see the narrator is completely separate from the protagonist this psychic distance is really far it was like in my first example where we could only ever state objective facts about the character and nothing internal you're probably not gonna be writing in it people rarely do because it's kind of the subjective parts of narrative that generally make narrative interesting so then let's look at their person omniscient I'm definitely not the expert on third-person omniscient I Eve never actually written in it but um you know I've talked about in classes and stuff so let's take a look at it if you want to know more about third-person omniscient I did you a video on it for read Z I'll leave a link to that in the cards it's not very long but it is just like an intro to third ah mission and how it can be used I did struggle a little bit with how I was gonna show this in a diagram but essentially the entire cast is within the narrator the narrator has access to everyone in the world now with third omniscient you usually have a little more distance between characters a narrator and that's kind of for a few reasons first of all oftentimes the narrator is more characterized so in a third person limited the narrator is the character just separated so not coming distinctly from their like their voice box but the narrator is still the character however was omniscient a lot of the time the narrator is their own character sometimes it's like in The Book Thief like I was talking about earlier where we actually distinctly know who the narrator is the narrator is death sometimes it's less like there isn't really a clear persona but we still kind of feel like there's a presence there a great example of this I don't have the book with me cuz they lunch my mom it's belcanto by Ann Patchett that's a really great example of an omniscient point of view the narrator has a distinct voice and we kind of feel like there's a character there we just don't really have a name or a face or presence to them I really like omniscient narratives that characterize the narrator I think it's a really cool technique it's not necessary but I think it's cool and the other reason why you generally are a little farther out is because you're going to be switching very rapidly you can literally an omission to change whose point of view you're in on the sentence to sentence basis and so if you were to be extremely close and then jump extremely close to another character in the next sentence it would be really jarring omniscient is generally a little farther out from the characters but it kind of compensates that by giving you intimacy with the narrator themselves it's like coming straight from the voice of God God being the narrator in this case because as writers we all want power trips and we just want to be deities of our own little worlds now let's take a look at third limited it's like a spectrum and you have infinite possibilities of how close or far your psychic distance can be along the spectrum I'm kind of just gonna highlight a few to show you the difference but it's not like you have five options you have infinite options of how close your psychic distance can be here we have a distant third limited so as you can see there is some overlap between narrator and character but it's not that much so here the narrative is still quite objective and we don't have that much access to the character saw so this is a third person that we do have access to characters thoughts but maybe they don't seek through that often and the narrative doesn't feel that intimate I think a lot of the time when narratives are written this way it's not done purposefully and it's just done by writers who maybe are accidentally pulling out their point of view and it often comes from withholding of not letting enough of the character color the narrative so now let's look at a close third person so in a close third person as you can see in this diagram there is still separation between the narrator and the character the narrator is still kind of functioning as like a crutch to help the character tell the story but the narrative is still very close to the character so there is still some separation but it's not that much and it's gonna feel pretty close and we're probably gonna feel relatively close to the character if not almost as close as we would feel in first-person even though there's technically some separation so here you might have a narrator who doesn't use exactly all the same language and exact thought patterns that your character would use but it's fairly close we're gonna get the characters emotions we're gonna get their judgments and we're gonna get those things relatively constantly this is kind of where I would say you know most standard third-person stories find themselves it's pretty close it's not first-person close but if done well it can feel first-person close if we were going back to that initial example this is kind of the space around Sal hated the rain but his dog didn't seem to care and damn how he hated this weather this is kind of where you're gonna be floating around in this kind of point of view now let's look at an extremely close third person so as you can see here there is still a tiny sliver of separation but they're almost the same this is kind of first person in third person and it's often known as free and direct narration and a lot of the time this could mean a stream of consciousness stream of consciousness is essentially like brain download so it's just direct thought coming straight from the characters brain it's extremely psychically close free and dirt narration can be super fun it's basically like first person in third person it can be really really voic-- especially if you have a character that lends itself to be really really boy see this can be interesting it can be hard to maintain but such a close third person can be kind of a fun technique that's kind of my intro to psychic distance this is a new thing for you I'd recommend when you start reading trying to pay attention to it you know ask yourself how close the psychic distance is if you look at a paragraph and see what sentences are close and what sometimes is or a bit farther start to study it in what you read and it'll make it easier to apply and control within what you write because really the most important thing with psychic distance isn't where you are but it's that you know how to control it and that you are where you want to be that's basically everything I wanted to say on psychic distance so thank you guys so much for watching if you have any questions you can always send me an Oscar and tumblr and I'll see you in another video bye [Music]

Channel: ShaelinWrites

Views: 17,112

Rating: 4.9839101 out of 5

Keywords: writer, writing, author, novelist, creative writing, writetube, writetuber, writing advice, how to write a book, how to write a novel, writing vlog, creative writing degree, books, nanowrimo, psychic distance, what is psychic distance, point of view, close point of view, POV, 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person, first person, third person, limited, omniscient, deep pov

Id: HUwgJY_1LjU

Length: 21min 54sec (1314 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2019