Narrative distance
Narrative distance is how far the narration sits from a character's consciousness — from a wide, cool overview down to the character's own unspoken words — and it can change from one sentence to the next.
John Gardner demonstrated it in The Art of Fiction with a ladder of sentences about the same man, each rung closer than the last:
- It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
- Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
- Henry hated snowstorms.
- God, how he hated these damn snowstorms.
- Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes.
Nothing about the point of view has changed. Only the distance has.
Good narration moves along that ladder on purpose: wide to establish a place or summarise a stretch of time, close for the beat that has to land. The move itself carries meaning — pulling back at the moment of grief reads as a character refusing to feel it.
Unmanaged drift is one of the most common notes in a developmental edit. A scene opens at rung four, wanders up to rung one somewhere in the middle, and the emotional climax then arrives from a long way off.