POV: Distance and Focalisation

Episode 019

Welcome back to The Writing Apothecary podcast and the last theory less on Point of View. Today we’re looking at Distance and Focalisation.

Just a word of warning, focalisation is a lot to wrap your head around it and I feel like every writer needs to understand to get the most out of their writing.

The major points of today’s podcast are:

• There are two kinds of distances: Emotional and Time.
• Emotional distance is the distance that readers sense between the narrator and the characters.
• It’s a distance that affects how close the reader feels to a character.
• Time distance, our readers assume that the events of the story happened recently, like as in within a few moments.
• Focalisation is basically another term for point of view, but it’s a bases in literary narratology.
• It gives expression to the perceiving mind or the sensibility in a text. It’s the expression of a character or narrator’s attitudes, thoughts, memories or experience at any given moment in the narrative.
• There are two kinds of focalisation: the external and internal focaliser.
• You need a POV contract with your readers and your characters to allow the story to flow and for your readers to know what they’re reading.

Tell me what did you take away from this week’s lesson?

I’d love to know.

Also, I would really appreciate it if you took the time to rate and review the podcast it helps people find our community and gets the podcast out into the world a little more.

References:

Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan