Loves and stratagems

pica-scribit:

It’s sad that Remus and Sirius never felt comfortable coming out to JKR.

(via eowin)

selori asked: "Narrative distance"? Do tell!

aiffe:

maskedfangirl:

Explain it in text? Without emphatic arm gestures or wine? Oh god. Okay. I’ll try.

All right, so narrative distance is all about the proximity between you the reader and the POV character in a story you’re reading. You might sometimes also hear it called “psychic distance.” It puts you right up close to that character or pulls you away, and the narrative distance an author chooses greatly affects how their story turns out, because it can drastically change the focus.

Here’s an illustration of narrative distance from far to close, from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (a book I yelled at a lot, because Gardner is a pretentious bastard, but he does say very smart things about craft):

1. It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
2. Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
3. Henry hated snowstorms.
4. God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
5. Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul

It feels a bit like zooming in with a camera, doesn’t it?  

I always hate making decisions about narrative distance, because I usually get it wrong on the first try and have to fix it in revision. When I was writing Lost Causes, the first thing I had to do in revision was go through and zoom in a little on the narrative distance, because it felt like it was sitting right on top of Bruce’s prickly skin and it needed to be underneath where the little biting comments and intrusive thoughts lived. 

Narrative distance is probably the simplest form of distance in POV, and there is where if I had two glasses of wine in me you would hit a vein of pure yelling. There are SO MANY forms of distance in POV. There’s the distance between the intended reader and the POV character, the distance between the POV character and the narrator (even if it’s 1st person!), the distance between the narrator and the author. There’s emotional distance, intellectual distance, psychological distance, experiential distance. If you look closely at a 3rd person POV story, you can tell things about the narrator as a person (and the narrator is an entity independent of the author) - like, for starters, you can tell if they’re sympathetic to the POV character by how they talk about their actions. Word choice and sentence structure can tell you a narrator’s level of education and where they’re from; you can sometimes even tell a narrator’s gender, class, and other less obvious identifying factors if you look closely enough. To find these details, ask: What does the narrator (or POV character, or author) understand?

I can’t put a name on the narrator of the Harry Potter books, but I can tell you he understands British culture intimately, what it’s like to be a teen boy with a crush, to not have money, to be lonely and abused, and to find and connect with people. There’s a lot he doesn’t understand (he doesn’t pick out little flags of queerness like I do, so he’s probably straight, for example), but he sympathizes with Harry and supports him. I like that narrator. I’m supposed to sympathize with him, and I do.

POV is made up of these little distances - countless small questions of proximity that, when stacked together, decide whether we’re going to root for or against a character, or whether we’ll put down a book 20 pages in, or whether a story will punch you in just the right place at just the right amount to make you bawl your eyes out.

There are so many different possible configurations of distance in this arena that there are literally infinite POVs. Fiction is magical and also intimidating as fuck.

This is really cool and something I’ve noticed—and often the culprit when an intended serious, angsty story ends up as a black comedy. Distance lets you laugh at the characters’ pain and struggles, while closeness gives permission to emote. The further back you pull, the less permission your readers have to feel the things the characters are feeling. Often more sarcastic, bitter characters will push for a distant narrator, when they may need a close one.

The author Milan Kundera does this thing I really like, however, where he pulls the narrative distance way the fuck back, then dissects, in intimate, almost clinical detail, every stray thought and emotion and memory and feeling in his characters’ lives. The narration is so detached, but the emotional details so complete, it creates this really interesting effect, like understanding the human heart as though they were the hearts of aliens, coming at it slowly, detail by detail, and only as the picture is completed realizing this is home, it was Earth all along.

However, I must take issue with a few things in this answer: I don’t like that it says you can tell education level. You can’t, and that’s classist. People are constantly assuming I went to/am in some kind of post-secondary education, and surprise, I’m an eighth grade dropout. They try to say that I’m still “educated” because I educated myself or whatever, but no, that doesn’t feel like a compliment to me, it feels like erasing my experiences, saying I’m not like those other uneducated trash, when I am EXACTLY those uneducated trash. You can absolutely tell things about an author’s experiences, culture, and assumptions by how they write, but I think that education, like cock, is socially constructed to utterly revolutionize your mind and your life in irreversible and noticeable ways, and fails to deliver on that promise. Being uneducated, like virginity, is more or less a social construct and ultimately, a myth.

Also I’m sorta annoyed that the default narrator in Harry Potter is male, despite it being third person and JKR being a woman and all. How does her experience as a woman not count for shit in her narration?

There is indeed something odd with the assumption that the narrator of the Harry Potter books is male. In many parts of the series, the narrator is almost synonymous with Harry, even if it’s still written in the third person. The narrative distance is very tiny. We’re nestled inside Harry’s mind, or at least perched on his shoulder. But what about the Quidditch matches in the first book, where the narrator leaves that perch, and Ron and Hermione are in focus instead, or in the first chapters of the last books, where a variety of characters appear. In some of them, the narrative distance is very great (as in the sixth), but in others, it isn’t (as in the fourth). Overall, the narrator does not seem like the person described by the first post, because that is basically Harry. I don’t actually like the idea of the narrator being a person. The narrator is an eye, a mediator, a web of connections between the author, the story and the reader. The narrator is not synonymous with the character whose POV the story is told from, but neither is the narrator synonymous with the author. In this particular case, I don’t see why one would insist on calling the narrator “he” when the author is a woman, although I’m not certain whether it would be correct to call the narrator “she” either. Although JKR’s perspective as a woman is certainly relevant, and should not be pushed aside, I am hesitant to say that it means that the narrator is female. The narrator isn’t a person, but an instrument, which the author uses. 

Of course, in some stories, the narrator is actually a character. The most obvious example is fairytales and children’s books, where you have an “I” who is not in the story itself, but that narrator easily merges with whoever reads the story out loud. If you read it to yourself, the “I” is whoever wrote it down (the author, or the maker of the book, even). There are some books where the narrator is overtly identified with the author - I seem to recall that Lemony Snicket does this to the extent that the narrator is referred to as ‘Mr Snicket’. Darren O'Shaugnessy even published his Saga of Darren Shan under the name of the main character to make the first person narrative more convincing. And in some novels, the narrator is its own character, divorced from the author. I can’t think of any English examples, but the Swedish novel Cromwells Huvud  ('Cromwell’s Head’) by Carina Burman has a narrator who tells the story by peering through windows and climbing fences, but who is also very unreliable, and therefore sometimes loses interest and goes off to check out something else just when interesting things start happening. At the same time, this narrator isn’t a character in the same way as the others in the book. No one ever sees or meets the narrator. The narrator exists on another plane. 

If Harry Potter was an anime.

gokaigreen:

(via gokaigreen-blog)

thesuperfeyneednoshoes:

prongsmydeer:

Omg, I want a love story in which my best friend calls me a racial slur and then proceeds to join a terrorist group based on killing people of my heritage and then accidentally endangers me and tries to bargain the lives of my child and the man I love away in exchange for me like some creepy bartering system and in causing my death decides to protect my son out of guilt but really spends his entire childhood being an asshole to him - OH WAIT, NO I DON’T. 

#this is a snape hate blog

While this is not a Snape hate blog, this does has a point. This level of messed-up is scary (if also rather fascinating). 

(via idabackwardsintherain)