Inside the Mind/Outside the Mind

An Office Hours on Narrative Distance

I announced this on Sunday, to our (beloved, swashbuckling, noble, loyal, and enterprise-supporting) Paid subscribers, but wanted to let our Free subscribers also know about a beautiful new edition of Tenth of December now available from TOC (The Other Collection) out of Berlin. This is a signed, limited, letterpress edition of the book. You can find out more about it here.

I also wanted to let you all know that the Calvino Prize is open for submissions. My good friend Paul Griner, from our Syracuse days, who is the director of Creative Writing at the University of Louisville, sent me the following description of the prize:

Established in 2005, the Calvino Prize for Fabulist Fiction has been recognizing and awarding some of the best experimental writing in the mode of Italo Calvino for nearly 20 years. The first-place prize package includes $2,000 and publication in Miracle Monocle, and, if the final judge selects a runner-up, that writer receives $500 and (new this year) the option for publication in Miracle Monocle. Winners have included emerging and established writers, including 2016 winner Ryan Ridge, author of New Bad News (2020); 2018 winner Amy Parker, author of Beasts and Children (2016); and 2022 winner Emily Temple, author of The Lightness (2020). This year’s final judge is Jenny Boully, and past judges include Joyce Carol Oates, Matt Bell, Aimee Bender, and Brian Evenson.

You can find out more about the Prize/submit work for it here.

Now on to our question of the week:

Q.

Dear George,

Let me join the chorus in thanking you for Story Club. It has become such an instructive, exciting and cozy part of my writing practice, and also very grounding when I find myself spinning out with my novel project.

My question for you is about narrative distance. Do you think contemporary readers are accustomed to being inside a protagonist’s head and feel cheated if we don't know her inner thoughts and feelings at all times? How do we decide the difference between a poorly drawn character and a character we have chosen to portray from the outside? Or even a character that is intentionally a little flat as if she is from a fable? Or when to be in a character's head and when to step outside without making the reader feel manipulated?

Not to beat a dead horse, but our discussion of Bunin’s “Light Breathing”, had me wondering about this for gazillionth time. I too sense Bunin’s project was to explore the impact of a cruel, hypocritical system–the “crushing forces” as Noel beautifully puts it [in the comments]. There were many scenes Bunin chose to leave out that could have explored Olya’s emotional state, but perhaps did not advance the crushing forces "project". If he were writing "Light Breathing: The Novel", would he have gotten more psychological?

I have found in my own writing that I will go back to an earlier draft where the character was still sketchy in my own mind, but that I am enjoying the distant fable-like quality of her. I then will get feedback (not from everyone, but more than one person) that they want to know more about her feelings.

I'm so curious to know what you think about all this!

A.

And thank you, Dear Questioner, for being here.

I have to start with my usual proviso that anything can work. For an instructor to say, “One must always,” or “One must never,” is, in my view, antithetical to the whole artistic project because, as they used to say in ads for the New York State Lottery: “Hey, you never know.”

We really don’t know, and if someone takes an artistic rule and purposely flouts it, that can work – it can even work because of the obvious flouting.

So all I can offer here is the way I tend to think about it, in my work.

In art, often, when we find ourselves thinking in a binary (“Is it better to do this or that?”) we may find that we’re actually trying to answer a different question.

Here, you’re asking about interiority, but as I’ve tried to answer, I’ve realized that this question morphs into another, bigger question:

What does any given section of a story do? Why is it there?

We might think about a story rich in interiority (Katherine Anne Porter’s “Flowering Judas”) vs. one with very little interiority (Isaac Babel’s “My First Goose,” which has very little.

(I might recommend that you go re-read those two stories now).

Both of these are great stories. So, that immediately tells us that both “lots of interiority” and “very little” are workable strategies.

What we might notice, on re-reading, is that, in both cases, what we are really looking for is action – that is, some seemingly meaningful alteration in the condition of the fictional world. We want to see a baseline condition and then a change to it, we might say.

And the interiority in these stories (or the absence of same) is there to serve that – to set us up for action, so that, when a thing happens, we believe it, and have some sense of what it’s supposed to mean.

To oversimplify somewhat: in the Porter story, we feel a rising tension about Braggioni’s presence in the house of the narrator, which comes to a climax when he stops showing up there.

In the Babel, the narrator (spoiler alert) kills the goose and then reacts to that. (The extent of the interiority might be said to be just that last line: “I had dreams—dreamt of women—and only my heart, crimson with murder, creaked and bled.”)

So, for our exercise here, it might be interesting for you to go through those two stories, highlighting places that you’d consider “interiority” and see what exactly these sections are doing, in the larger scheme of the story – how they prepare us for the pop/bang that makes the story a story. (Why was it best to go interior here? Why best to stay in described action there?)

These are the kinds of choices we are making every day as we write and edit.

So, I’m asking: What is the ultimate basis for these choices, when you make them?

See how, now, we’ve moved away from the interiority vs. non-interiority question and on to something more essential?

From there, it would, of course, be up to the writer, how much interiority she wants to use, and this would depend on the story at hand and also on her particular set of gifts (someone who is very good at interiority should do as much of it as she can).

But there might be one more aspect here for us to consider: what does the form prefer, generally?

I sometimes find myself using, with my students, the phrase, “You get no points for…”

What I mean by this is that the form inherently rewards certain things and discounts other (easier) things. I’m not sure I can prove this, but it almost feels like an artistic form rewards the things that are harder to do, and/or more unusual; things that exist on the upper end of the form’s difficulty spectrum, or – and this may be more accurate – that “play to the strengths of” the form while, at the same time, serving a genuine artistic function.

A musical example: a beginning guitarist is taught simple, first- position versions of the main chords. When we hear someone strumming that form of a chord, we think, “Ah, yes, basic guitar.” Whereas if someone plays a less-common form of the chord, an inversion or unusual voicing, this sounds…different. More innovative, maybe – we hear that “guitar” in a new way.

I’ll just say that I think the story form rewards meaningful action – it prefers it over assertion, or an unmotivated change in a situation. It just likes action – action causing a change in the character’s position.

Meaningful action is hard to achieve; when we find some in a story, we get a little thrill and our trust for the writer increases, I’d say.

(Again, this is just my belief/intuition from all these years of playing around in my particular aesthetic garden, with my particular and limited talent.)

But if this is the case, then we might think about interiority as a means of supporting action.

I often find myself, having written some good internal monologue, asking two things: 1) Why is this character thinking this (i.e., what put her in the position to be having these thoughts?) and 2) What is all of this thinking going to cause?

Likewise, if I happen to stumble on a good, meaningful action, I’m alert to the possibility that a character might want to mentally reflect on what’s just happened. This is a way of enhancing that action and, sometimes, setting things up for yet another action.

As an example – if you look at pages 233-234 of my collection Tenth of December (in the titular story) we find that our hero, Don Eber, has just watched a young boy fall in through the ice of a frozen pond. (This is the action; Eber’s realization is at “Kid was swimming” and goes down to “boundary of the black—“). Eber starts down to try and save the kid and then, on 234, I give him a chance to (mentally) react to the action he’s just seen. (“Suddenly he was not purely the dying guy…juggling routine he’d—").

This has the effect of suddenly infusing this mission with purpose; he’s recalled a different aspect of himself, and the guy who was formerly just The Dying Guy now has something invested in saving the boy.

So, the interiority is all tied in with the non-interiority (his observation of the action, i.e., the kid falling through the ice) and the bigger purpose is to draw you into and through that text, and to keep the stakes rising.

So, in my view of things, we “get no points” for merely showing someone thinking, or for sort of depicting an actual person that we know; and we don’t “get any points” for eschewing all interiority and just depicting action, in a super-demonstration of minimalism.

These things have to be in service of something.

I’ve already gone on too long, but I’d like to quickly take up two specific questions our dear Questioner asked:

How do we decide the difference between a poorly drawn character and a character we have chosen to portray from the outside?

Right. My gut answer is: if we’re doing it right, we should be able to posit the character’s mental state from her actions. (If you read through “My First Goose,” you’ll find that, if someone asked you to “do” the character’s interiority at any point, you likely could.) Whereas, sometimes, we’re not sure of where we’ve put the character – the story isn’t clear on that yet. And that can lead us to feel that “poorly drawn” quality. (And one way to get more clarity, is to try to write the internal monologue. Sometimes I do this and the character “decides” to do a thing, and then I let him do it and cut the interior monologue, if that works better).

Our Questioner also asked:

(How do we decide) when to be in a character's head and when to step outside without making the reader feel manipulated?

I am a big believer in the “whatever works, is best” philosophy. There’s no outside, objective way to decide. We just have to try it both ways and, eschewing all rules and guidance, go with what comes alive on the page.

It’s comforting to have some sort of system but there can’t be one. The only “system” I believe in is throwing a lot of energy at the story by sketching out different approaches, and then doing a fresh read and seeing how things land.

I know this is a little vague – but it’s the God’s honest truth.

Finally, Story Club: can we brainstorm a bit on this question of narrative distance? Can you think of stories in which interiority dominates? Where there’s none at all? Can you think of a story that put you off by being too-interior, or too non-interior?

As always, thanks for being here.