SV Bertrand
Finding the Right Narrative Distance

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

When I teach my memoir class, my main goal is to help my students find the narrative tools and devices they need to see themselves as a character on the page. Even in memoir, in fact, especially in memoir writing, seeing oneself as a character is essential to transforming one’s raw life experience into a story. Craft gives us the tools we need to find the right narrative distance towards the emotional power of our story. I’ve used all kinds of metaphors to help students envision how that might happen. Think of narrative tools as oven mitts, I say. You need them in order to handle hot (i.e., emotionally powerful) material! Use craft as a vessel, an armor, an unusual outfit—whatever it is that will allow you to hold on to the experience without being overwhelmed by its emotional power. But the best analogy for narrative distance is one I heard a fellow teacher at The Writers Studio use, and over the years, I have expanded it quite a bit.

Imagine, I tell my students, that you are at your office’s annual holiday party. A few hours in, you go to the restroom. You see a colleague you do not know well standing by the last hand dryer, crying her eyes out. You feel awkward, unsure of what to do. You also feel you can’t quite ignore her, so you ask: What’s going on?

The woman begins a long, rambling story about a text she just received from someone she had been dating for the last six months. The someone in question seems to be breaking up with her. The woman gives you all kinds of details in a somewhat incoherent, random fashion; she breaks down in tears and hiccups as she speaks; she messes up the chronological order of what happened; and she gives you way too many intimate details. 

You listen, but you can barely make sense of what really happened. You do get that the woman is heartbroken, but you don’t really feel her pain because you can’t quite relate to her—her story is too confusing, too raw, and too unprocessed. You begin to ask yourself: why didn’t I use the restroom at the other end of the floor? As she goes into a stall to get more toilet paper to blow her nose, you go into another to pee. When you come out, the woman is gone. You breathe a sigh of relief.

Six months later, there is another office social gathering, this time a dinner at a nearby restaurant, and lo and behold, you happen to be sitting next to that same woman. You smile at each other a bit awkwardly. You think of her story, and after some small talk and some hesitation, you decide to ask her:

Did you ever see that guy again?
The woman looks at you, eyebrows raised.
What guy?
The guy who broke up with you via text at the holiday party?
Oh, the woman says. No way. She shrugs. He just wasn’t the right guy. 

These, I tell my students, are two examples of failed narrative distance. In the first encounter, at the holiday party, the woman is telling the story with zero distance towards what has just happened and is therefore unable to turn her experience into an engaging story because she is overwhelmed by its emotional power; in the second encounter, she has way too much distance, so much that there is no way she herself can actually connect to the emotional power of her story, let alone share it in a way that will be engaging to someone else.

Not enough, or too much narrative distance, leads us to the same place, a place where we aren’t able to see ourselves as the characters to whom the story has happened. The first step to get it right might seem counterproductive, but it works: instead of focusing on what your story is, think of all the possible ways in which any part of the story can be told. Focus on the narrative tools: persona, voice, tone, verb tense, language. Think of who is telling the story—you, the storyteller, who is different from the person to whom the stuff happened, the character who went through it, and survived it. Basically, just to think of one’s life story in terms of craft is in itself an act of empathy, one that allows you, the storyteller, to create some narrative distance while also keeping you engaged and connected to the emotional power of your story. 

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SV Bertrand’s stories and poems have appeared in Epiphany, Cleaver Magazine, december magazine, and Pelegrine Journal, among others. She received a Pushcart Special Mention for fiction and was a finalist for the 2019 Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize. A native French speaker, she was born and raised in Montreal. She teaches Memoir at The Writers Studio in NYC and is the co-founding editor of Cagibi, a literary journal.