Psychic Distance

Probably the best, i.e. most useful/exciting, workshop of the lot at York, for me, was Debi Alper talking about Psychic Distance.

Debi and Emma Darwin spend an entire week on the topic in their six week on-line course 'Self-editing your novel', which runs three or four times a year via the Writer's Workshop, but even the single example she made us attempt was an eye-opener.  And not only for writing, but reading too - I could recognise Psychic  Distance in action in Lesley Glaister's writing, and now know that it is one of the main reasons books totally fail to sparkle.

More information here:
http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/psychic-distance-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it.html

More useful, by far, than just listening was being told to do an exercise using Psychic  Distance.  We were given ten minutes in which to describe the reaction of a soldier just returned from war as he meets his father for the first time, handing him a photograph:

Steps.  Five of them.  Will I be able to manage them, with half a leg and the other barely functioning?  I’ll look bloody silly if I fall, land on my arse.  

Though it wouldn't be the first time he’d’ve seen my fucking arse either, from what Ma said.  Then I had all my fucking bits too ... but O Christ ... he doesn’t have a fucking clue who I am.

I grope for the photograph, leaning on the concrete wall, half my mind taken up in the looking at him.

Although I do already use it instinctively, it was hard to do, and the follow-up - the ignorant father's response, even harder:

Another wounded soldier.

You can only do so much, and this one so young, no more than twenty, twenty-two perhaps.  The age that ...

No.  Impossible ... even though his eyes are so like Mary’s.  So very much like hers, blue of cornflower.  Too long since they smiled at me.  I was a bloody, bloody fool ...

What?

What’s this? ... A photograph?... Mary ... oh Mary.