Tag: Art of Fiction

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.