The Authorial Ant Farm

 Authorial distance describes the ‘size’ of the gap between what the characters think and what the author believes (ie, the ‘objective reality’ of your little created universe). As I noted on Monday, the best stories involve characters messing up their lives, or generally being flawed people, so it’s important to show the reader the gap between fictional perception and fictional objective reality*. So how does one show the reader that the characters might not be right about everything? The easiest way is to have multiple viewpoints, which tend to show off gaps in character knowledge by filling them in with more information from another perspective. Another method is having an omniscient narrator, as long as that narrator is there to point out what is really going on, as opposed to shilling the character—C.S. Lewis is a good example of an author using omniscient narration to create suspense by telling us that the characters are unaware of some important fact or have completely misinterpreted a situation. For a first-person perspective, it’s more challenging, as we’re seeing the world exclusively filtered through the character’s eyes. More subtlety is necessary to show actions or events that could be interpreted differently, things that ‘don’t add up’ when considered solely from that character’s perspective. Another option is to show the character’s cognitive dissonance, as they struggle with facts or arguments which challenge their previous conception of how the world works. Also, avoid the temptation to have a character intuit or figure things out for no reason, or have a get-out-of-jail free moment wherein they bend or break the rules of their world without consequence or an appropriate buildup. This reeks of the character having a direct line to the author, instead of being their own fictional person who is free to wreck up their lives in a suitably dramatic and realistic fashion.
*Is there such a thing? Philosophical types may discuss amongst yourselves in the comments. I would be delighted to hear your thoughts.