I was too clever by half. I am drafting a new project, likely to be a novella, and I wanted to try something different.
Before Claude dashed my hopes, I thought I was onto something novel. The working title is Two Kings. The device was to employ a camera-dolly metaphor from a third-person perspective. Distant scenes were captured even in a casual past tense, whilst close shots would be intimate, in the immediate present tense.
I imagined framing, focus, aperture, and focal length. Is it a wide establishing shot or macrophotography?
As I discovered, this technique was published in The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner in 1991. In summary, it looks something like this:
| Level | Description | Typical effect |
| Far | Historical, panoramic, formal, report-like | Scope, authority, irony, myth, social structure |
| Medium-far | Character viewed from outside, with some interpretation | Social legibility, behavioural reading |
| Medium | Character’s feelings or attitudes stated plainly | Ordinary narrative access |
| Close | Character’s perceptions, assumptions, and pressure shape the prose | Immediacy, sympathy, tension |
| Very close | Syntax and imagery approach thought, sensation, or psychic rupture | Embodiment, panic, desire, shame, dissociation, revelation |
I don’t wish to overshare his book, but this is the essence. I have since read the book and will incorporate some of it, including this, in this manuscript.
Ridley Park 