Letters From Kelly

Lately, my students and I are preoccupied with psychic (or narrative) distance, or how close the reader feels to a story. In close psychic distance, the reader stands next to the characters, perhaps even sitting in their laps. Long psychic distance puts the reader across the street, or in a hot air balloon overhead, or looking down from heaven.

John Gardner said in The Art of Fiction, “In good fiction, shifts in psychic distance are carefully controlled.” Writers often interpret that to mean the change should be imperceptible.

And sure, that works. In her story “Snowfall,” Deesha Philyaw uses first-person plural to plunk her readers as close to her characters Arletha and Rhonda as possible— or so you think.

“We, who apparently are built for everything, are simply not built for this. No gloves exist that keep our hands from freezing as we move snow and ice from one spot to another and from the car windshield. And no, the physical activity does not warm us up. It makes usresentful.”

Later, Philyaw uses second person to pull the reader even closer:

“In the South, the weather does not hurt you down to your bones or force you to wake up a half an hour early to remedy what has been done to your steps, your sidewalk, your driveway and your car, as you slept.”

The tightening psychic distance in “Snowfall” is a tractor beam—invisible and inescapable.

But you can be equally effective when your reader is acutely aware of the change.

In his film Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock starts viewers medium-close to Richard, who may or may not have murdered his ex-wife. The audience is close enough to suspect him, but not enough to be sure.

Then, another character kills someone, and we’re in the room where it happens.

The film then alternates between Richard and the real killer, Hitchcock keeping his audience uncomfortably close to the murderer. We’re walking right alongside him as he runs into his former co-worker Babs, as they stroll through London, as he invites Babs to see his apartment. At this point, the audience is trying to use its close psychic distance to psychically communicate STAY OUT OF THE APARTMENT, BABS!

Spoiler: Babs goes into the apartment.

And then, famously, the camera leaves.

It backs away from the closed door, down three flights of a winding, silent stairwell, onto the sidewalk, and across the street, people and cars filling the space between the audience and the building. We’re as far from that apartment as we can get without a rocket.

I saw Frenzy in a crowded theater, and when that camera started gliding backward, the once-quiet audience started shouting, “GobackgobackGOBACK!”

Different stories, different styles, different distances, but one thing’s the same. When Philyaw and Hitchcock shift the psychic distance, the story intensifies.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Last week Gothamist managed to get hold of a hand-drawn map of the interior of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall, created by the student protesters who were occupying it.

It marked off an area for smoking, and its legend noted where you could find a ladder, water fountains or “tons of books.”

Of course it immediately became a Rorschach test for how people feel about the campus protests dominating the news of late—how someone interprets the symbols and legends likely reveals more about them than about the map or mapmakers themselves.

Which is what delights me about this map, and all maps really. They’re never, ever solely about geography.

“The power of maps to fire imagination is well known,” novelist Michael Chabon wrote in his essay collection Maps and Legends. “And there is no map so seductive as the one marked…by the romantic blank of unexplored territory.”  

And is there a more fertile or fascinating unexplored territory than a writer’s subconscious? I doubt it.

Coincidentally, this spring, I’ve been asking my Gotham students to do some mapmaking of their own—with thrilling, surprising results. I think that’s because sketching a map taps three big wells:

• Drawing something, anything, coaxes thoughts and ideas to burble up from your mind’s depths into your imagination, and to emerge on paper, where they can make themselves useful.
• Sketching out a place in your story —an imaginary country, a ghost town, your childhood bedroom — helps you find the borders of the place, and also, your story. You’ll identify, too, the borders of those “romantic blanks of unexplored territory” you may not yet know exist. Of course, once you know where a border lies, you can cross it, and explore.
• Maps require symbols and legends, designating landmarks, locations of high value. Desert maps take pains to mark the points where a traveler would find water; ghost tour maps mark the sites places where apparitions have visited, as well as cemeteries and burial grounds. Locating and naming landmarks forces writers to identify what’s valuable in a story; choosing the symbols and creating the legend to explain them encourages you to explore why those places deserve to be landmarks, and what they mean.

Once you’ve mapped a place, you cannot help but start to think about the people who’ve moved through it — the locals, the visitors, the settlers, the plunderers, the commuters, the lost. The characters of your story, in other words. They come to you.

Try it yourself: Sketch out a map of a place in your current WIP. See what borders you add, which ones mark the undiscovered lands. Then, add symbols for only the landmarks that are meaningful to the protagonist. Write a scene at one of those landmarks.

See what adventures await you.

Kelly Caldwell,

Dean of Faculty

Lisa Cron, author of a craft book I recommend a lot called Story Genius, has often said that the biggest mistake she saw writers make when she was a literary agent is that they write pages, not stories.

“They have a great idea, their prose is gorgeous, and there’s a lot of action, [but] there’s no real story, and so no driving sense of urgency,” she writes.  “Story is about an internal struggle, not an external one.”

There are so many ways to fall into this–digressions, elaborate descriptions, or following a character around for 30 pages, just to see what they do. Research is my weakness. I’ll interrupt a scene five times to tell you about the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.

And it’s not wrong to write those things and follow those thoughts in our early drafts. Early drafts are for discovery, in my opinion, and if you want to write a page of description to discover one great line or write about the Galveston Hurricane to keep one juicy factoid, well, Ok then.

For author Harrison Scott Key, his traps are humor (no surprise there, he’s a winner of the Thurber Prize for Humor), and backstory. In a recent visit to my class, he said that in the first draft of his most recent book How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, he dedicated many entire chapters to backstory.

“There were a bunch that were so fun, and, I don’t know, maybe Dostoevsky or Tolstoy would have left them all in,” he said. “But I took them out because, while they fit within the structure of it, I’m not Tolstoy and I need to keep things moving.”

He started thinking about how his book would answer the question, “What is going to get people, when they finish a chapter, to turn the page?”

The book’s inciting incident is the moment that his wife of 20 years tells him she’s in love with another man. High drama, right? But… where’s the story?

Harrison started trying to figure that out with spreadsheets, which, for a while, helped him get perspective. Until they didn’t.

“Every story is really 2 stories. The first half is the thing [the protagonist] sets out to do. And then the second half is whatever actually happens,” Harrison said. “If our job is to win the football game, you’re going to win that football game by the middle or you’re going to lose it by the middle. And then the last half the book is going to be about what was really going on with you when you were trying to win that football game.”

Harrison took the moments that felt special beyond their inherent drama, wrote them on post-it notes, and tacked just those moments to a bulletin board.

“It’s a good practice to ask, what’s got to be in there?” Harrison said. ”Put a pin in those big moments, and you can build your bridge on all that.”

And how were the post-it-worthy high-octane moments different from the rest?

“Change,” he said.

Once they were up there, Harrison could see an infrastructure. And once you have that, you have a story.

Your turn, writers. Take whatever you’re working on right now, and look for your high-octane moments, then find the ones where something big changes, and give those turning points their own space.

What story are they telling?

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty