Questions, questions... Recently, I’ve been talking about questions in fiction with my online writing group. Our starting point was that the desire for an answer to an interesting question is one of the key things that keeps a reader going to the end of a book. I...
In my post on psychic distance, I made a sweeping generalisation – that most modern-day writers want to create a close perspective, in which the reader has insight into the inner workings of the main character. It is a generalisation, but it’s one I stand by...
Narrative perspective is the window that a writer opens up for the reader to look through onto a fictional world. If the reader is going to stay at that window for as long as it takes for the story to unfold, the view has to be clear, uncluttered and steady. I believe...
In my post entitled It’s all a matter of perspective, I touched on something called psychic distance – sometimes known as narrative, authorial or emotional distance. Psychic distance is about how much space there is between the reader and the character whose...
