Relationships & Partners and Writing Skills Tips. (A Writing Advice Guide Book

Temporal Distance?! Is It Really A Point of View? I Don't See It.

I feel like Temporal Distance belongs in complexity to plots not necessarily point of view, Jame Hynes.
Yes, I omitted it from an earlier discussed lecture 15 and now you know why so here it is what Temporal Distance is apparently below.

Temporal Distance
The other element of point of view and voice that we need to consider is the distance in time from which the story is told. Partly, this is simply a matter of verb tense, but it's also about a larger issue, namely, the distance of the first-person narrator or the third-person narrative voice from the events being depicted.

With a first-person narrator, you have to decide just how close the narrator is to the events he or she is describing. Huck Finn is told mainly in the past tense, but the implication of Huck's voice throughout the book is that he is still a boy, telling us about a series of events that have happened in the recent past. In other words, it's a story about a child told by the child.

We get a slightly different effect from Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, where the distance of Scout, the first-person narrator of the novel, is deliberately ambiguous. At times, her narration is immediate and limited to what she knew as a young girl, but the novel also steps back and narrates the events from the point of view of Scout as a grown woman, looking back on her childhood. We get a child's-eye view of childhood leavened with an adult's retrospective explanation of events that Scout as a child wouldn't have fully understood.

This element of temporal distance from the events in the narrative is just as important with third-person narratives. Being the default tense of so many narratives, the past tense doesn't necessarily mean the distant past: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is told in the past tense, for example, but it was both written and set during the 1870s. George Eliot's Middlemarch, on then the hand, was published in the early to tell ut set 40 years cartier, in the 1830s. Tolstoy uses the past tense to tell a contemporary story, while Eliot uses the past tense to tell a story of the recent past, giving the reader some distance from the events.

The 40-year timespan may not seem like much, but if we transfer the difference to the present day, we can see that Eliot's use of the past tense is significantly different from Tolstoy's.

Consider the difference between watching the two television shows Breaking Bad and Mad Men: Breaking Bad was set more or less in the present moment, allowing no temporal distance between the story and the viewers. But with Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, we can at least cling to the illusion that we are better behaved than the people who worked on Madison Avenue were at that time.

I honestly think you're overly worried and over-critically complicated again and again this doesn't seem like a point of view but rather something that belongs in the setting chapter or just adding complexity to a plot lecture. It is more the subject of flash-forwards and flashbacks which I did without knowing this was even a point of view in Winter's Magical Adventure which covers both The Magical Adventure plot line and the Mystery of the Abyss plot line in a far simpler way than you could have described, Professor.-Lumna10.

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Chapters left in This Book 53 chapters left, Skylights. Three more chapters till 50 then I'll be more than a quarter done with this writing book guide. Enjoy, Skylights, enjoy!-Lumna10 is out signing off for now, readers.