Immediacy in Fiction Writing: What It Is and Why It Matters

Great writing takes readers on a journey. And to do that, it relies on language to pull the reader into the story and feel as though we are, on some level, experiencing the events of the story for ourselves. It connects us on a fundamental, human level with its characters. When it’s done really well, readers forget they’re even reading.

We’ve all felt that, right? That moment when you look up, dazed, from the book in your hand and realise time has slipped by and you’ve been completely absorbed by a bunch of people who have felt absolutely real to you, even though your brain has constructed them whole cloth from a collection of words on a page?

This happens because the author understands how to immerse readers in the storyworld they’ve created. There are a number of different ways to do this. Character is a big one — characters are our access point into a narrative, and a well-written, relatable, three-dimensional character is one of the most powerful tools in the writer’s craft box. Effective pacing is another: the most engaging stories deliver just enough information at just the right moment to build tension and keep readers reading on.

But when it comes right down to it, the greatest plot and the best-developed characters in the world don’t count for much if the author can’t find a way to make the reader believe — even for a moment — that the events they’re describing on the page are real, present, and actively happening in front of us as we read.

That’s where we need to understand and engage with the idea of immediacy.

What do we mean by “immediacy” in fiction?

Immediacy is, to be fair, a bit of a slippery concept. It means different things at different times and in different genres. But for an all-purpose, broad definition, we can think of immediacy as the way we experience the action on the page as though it’s unfolding around us in real-time. It’s direct, it’s happening right now, and it prompts an emotional response in a reader that’s designed to place them right in the centre of the scene along with the story’s characters. It’s compelling. It’s engaging. And it creates a powerful connection between reader and narrative.

You can see why this is kind of a Big Deal in writing.

How can authors make their writing feel immediate?

The (very unsatisfying) short answer is: it depends. On lots of factors. Genre is important — what immerses a reader in the fictional moment will be very different in, say, a high-octane espionage thriller versus an historical family drama. Both are about placing the reader in the scene, but that looks different, depending on what the reader needs to feel as though they’re placed in the scene.

For example, try this hypothetical high-octane espionage thriller:

The clock struck midnight, chimes echoing in the empty streets. Eric’s shoes skidded on the cobbles as he darted left, heart hammering in his chest. Ahead of him, the warehouse doors stood open. A shot rang out behind him, bullet skimming Eric’s ear before slamming into the brickwork at his shoulder.

Immediacy comes from visceral, body-centred writing that prompts the reader to experience the action in Eric’s shoes. We want the reader to feel the thunder of Eric’s racing heart, to hear the gunshot ricocheting off brickwork in the darkness.

Strip out that immediacy and we have the professional distance of a news report:

It was midnight. Eric was running through the streets, pursued by the enemy. He had just veered quickly left towards the open warehouse doors when he heard a gunshot behind him. The bullet narrowly missed his head and embedded in a nearby brick wall.

There’s nothing wrong with the writing, per se. The words deliver the same information. It’s just that all the impact has been stripped from that delivery, and we’re left with the feeling that we’re dispassionately observing events from a place of complete safety. We’re not invited to imagine our way into Eric’s shoes, and so there’s no real sense of investment in his escape. It all feels… flat.

Immediacy is about placing the reader in the scene. It’s about giving their unconscious brains enough information to prompt a mirror emotional response to what the point-of-view character is experiencing. To do that, we need to consider the following questions:

What sensory information is the point-of-view character experiencing? What can they see, hear, smell, feel, taste? If you’re writing an action scene, you’ll need to be careful about how you weave this information into the story, as readers will be laser-focused on uncovering what happens next (and they’ll be less keen to have the narrative suspended for a lengthy description of the sensory profile of the area). A love scene, on the other hand, is much more available to luxuriant sensory description. It’s all about what the reader wants and needs in the moment.
What key emotion is guiding the point-of-view character’s experience in the scene? A character in the grip of extreme fear will be motivated to notice details connected to trying to stay safe. They’ll scour the shadows, they’ll scan for exit points, they’ll take careful note of who else is in the vicinity. They’ll be listening for the faintest of noises; they’ll feel their breath catch in their throat and the sweat prickle at the base of their spine. But a character’s experience of joy will be governed by pleasure-centred senses. The sun may caress their skin. They may notice the scent of pleasant things on the air. They may hear birds singing in the trees, a gentle hum of voices, the distant sound of a radio playing a love song. Create the world according to the character’s experience of it, and you’ll prompt your reader to imagine their way into that same space.
What’s the internal tempo of the scene? Dramatic and pacing sequences generally require stronger verbs and a shorter, choppier sentence structure. Softer, calmer sequences lend themselves to longer, more flowing sentences. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule — and it depends heavily on the author’s particular writing style — but it’s a safe place from which to start.

“Immediacy comes from visceral, body-centred writing that prompts the reader to experience the action in the character’s shoes. Strip that out and we have the professional distance of a news report.”

The myth about first person versus third person and immediacy

One of my all-time favourite blog posts is Scott Westerfeld’s discussion of Single Limited Viewpoint. There’s no sense paraphrasing this level of genius, so I’m just going to go ahead and quote it in full:

I frequently see people saying, “First person present tense is a very immediate way to tell a story!” Which is crap. The grammar of a narrative and its distance are two different things.

Take this story opening:

“The summer has been long and boiling, my body changing in ways I don’t understand yet, my mind tangling in those changes’ wake. So it’s a mystery how I first get the idea to set fire to the home of the only girl I’ve ever loved.”

Yes, it’s in present tense and first person, but there’s an elegiac lilt to the language, a sense that everything has already taken place. The grammar doesn’t change that.

But let’s say you started the story this way:

“It was a hot day, and Roger was bored and itchy. ‘Let’s set fire to Cindy’s house,’ he said.”

This is in the past tense and third person, but it’s way more immediate, with the story happening in real time before our eyes. In other words, the grammar doesn’t determine distance. Far more important is the way the story is told.” (source)

The bottom line is this: there are many ways to increase or decrease the immediacy of your writing. Narrative point of view is largely irrelevant when it comes to immediacy in fiction. Write in first person or third person POV as you choose — neither one is inherently better or worse for creating immediacy.

What actually impacts immediacy in fiction

Westerfeld talks about the grammar of the narrative and its distance as two separate things. By grammar, he’s talking about the narrative perspective (first, third, or — yep — second person) and the tense (past or present — he/she said or he/she says). He argues that we need to consider the grammar and the distance separately, and he’s right — but that’s not to say that grammar and distance aren’t connected.

Let’s look at some of the ways in which writers — inadvertently or otherwise — impact the immediacy of their writing.

Perfect tense

Now, don’t get me wrong: the perfect tense exists and remains part of everyday English because it’s an incredibly useful verb form. And you’ll definitely need to use it sometimes in your writing. It’s not a problem in and of itself. The problem comes when it’s overused, or used in places where the simple tense would work just as well.

What is the perfect tense? Fair question. The perfect tense is a verb form that we use to describe actions or states that are completed at the time of speaking or have relevance to the present or another point in time. Any time you see a combination of the verb “to have” plus the past participle of another verb, you’ve got the perfect tense. For example:

She had finished watering the plants when the postman arrived. This is the past perfect form of the verb “to finish” — “she had finished” means that the “finish” action is in the past when the “arrive” action happens.

She has travelled a long way today, and now she’s tired. This is the present perfect form of the verb “to travel” — she’s tired now because she has travelled earlier today.

By the time he comes home, she will have left. You can even do this in the future tense! Even though neither of these actions (him coming home, her leaving) have happened at the time of speaking, we’re able to order them temporally right now. Her leaving will have been completed before he comes home.

I’m going to explore the perfect tense in much more detail in next month’s blog, but for now suffice it to say: by definition, it distances the events it describes from the present moment. You can’t have immediacy if the action you’re describing is not happening in the moment. That’s fine for short bursts of activity that the reader doesn’t — for whatever reason — need to experience with the character, but it’s much less narratively engaging than placing the reader directly in the action. It’s best to use this tense sparingly and strategically.

Passive voice

Talking of grammatical constructions with fuller explanations in another blog post…

The passive voice gets a lot of bad press these days, and I feel like that’s largely undeserved. Like the perfect tense, it has its uses, and it’s absolutely not true to say that every sentence rendered in the passive voice would be better off transposed into the active (which is a thing I’ve heard argued more than once).

I’m going to quote myself here (yikes), because I’ve already defined the passive voice in the other blog post and it doesn’t seem sensible to duplicate that effort. This is what we mean when we talk about the passive voice:

“A verb is in the passive voice when the subject of the sentence is acted on by the verb.” (source)

Let’s break that down. And the easiest way to do that is to look at how everything in a sentence functions in the active voice, which is how most simple sentences are constructed.

Let’s say, for example, you write the following sentence: “The author drinks the cup of coffee.” The subject of an active sentence is the person or thing performing the action — in this case, the author. The action they are performing is drinking. The object of the sentence is the thing being acted upon — here, it’s the cup of coffee. Active voice: the subject —> performs an action —> on the object.

In the passive voice, though, the subject and object are switched. In the passive voice, the subject is the thing being acted upon by the object. If we change our sentence above to the passive voice, it becomes: “The cup of coffee is drunk by the author.”

Which is clearly an example of when not to use the passive voice, because that last sentence is a mess. And, in general, the passive voice does pose a threat to immediacy, because immediacy is about action, and the passive voice switches the focus of the sentence from the actor to the acted-upon. The switch from “the cat chased the mouse” to “the mouse was chased by the cat” adds extra words, adds complexity to a sentence that genuinely does not need to be any more complex, and it removes the sense that the actions in the sentence are happening right now, because the focus has shifted from the actual performer of those actions.

And yet… “she was chased through the streets by a group of people she didn’t know” only works effectively in the passive voice, because the passive voice actually increases tension here. We can’t render this information in the active voice without revealing something about the identity and motivations of the people “she” doesn’t know, and the very fact that their identity and motivations are unknown adds to the stakes.

So… yeah. It’s complicated.

Overly complicated sentence structure

I say this as somebody who once ran an unbroken sentence for a 12-line paragraph, and didn’t even notice until it was pointed out to me by an editor. So please know that this advice comes from a place of love and understanding.

If your authorial voice is complex, elegiac, meandering, and packed with big words, I love this for you. (For us, I should say. I am also you in this description. I love this for us.) But there’s a time and a place for complex, elegiac, meandering, and packed with big words, and there’s a time for short, sharp, and to the point. Consider:

She ran, ran harder, ran faster, ran until the breath seared her windpipe and her heart hammered so fiercely in her chest that she feared her ribs might crack like porcelain; ran until the muscles in her legs were washed raw with the acid-sting of exhaustion and her feet burned with every impact; ran while her reverberating brain hissed with white-noise panic, until the world narrowed to a single data point, and that data point screamed stay alive.

That sentence contains no fewer than two semicolons, you’ll notice, and could quite easily have been chopped into multiple, shorter, discrete sentences, each of which focuses on a separate action beat. But is it wrong? No, I’d argue, it’s not. Each beat is thematically connected by the continuous action of running, and I think there’s a strong argument to be made that running the sequence together into one long, complex sentence actually ups the urgency by giving the reader no time to catch their breath. (Much like the point-of-view character.)

However. Let me also present to you Exhibit B:

The market place was already filling up with people — it was noon and almost the lunchtime rush — as she darted through the narrow cobbled streets, exhausted, hot, thirsty, after just 10 minutes of running beneath the searing sun; sweat dripped into her eyes making it harder to see the scattered motorbikes that zipped around her on this dual-purpose back road, harder to keep track of the men who’d been pursuing her since they’d ambushed her outside the hotel, before she’d had a chance to get her bearings, and so she’d simply run, run hard and fast, her legs aching with every stride.

This is a sentence that’s emerged from the writer’s pen exactly as its component parts have emerged in the writer’s mind. It’s rich with detail, full of sensory detail, but the information flow is disjointed, the order of information reveal doesn’t give the reader a chance to fully orient themselves in the scene, and the complexity of the sentence structure means the reader has to step out of the experience of reading and spend moments parsing the discrete beats to understand what’s happening and why. Once you’ve knocked the reader out of the storyworld like this, that’s it for engagement. They’ve noticed themselves reading, and they’re no longer immersed in your narrative.

Final thoughts: finding the beat

Immediacy in fiction is not one thing. Nor is it not one thing. It’s different for every author, every genre — even every story. It’s about drawing the reader deeply, invisibly, irresistibly into the world you’re weaving from words, and how you do that will be intensely personal and unique to both your narrative and your voice.

But it’s the very core of connecting your reader to your words, and it’s worth taking the time to get it right — whatever “right” might look like in context.

Get comfortable with the broad strokes of what immediacy might look like, and re-read your work through an “immediacy lens” as you edit. Does this scene place your reader viscerally inside your character’s world? Have you given your reader the tools to stand in your character’s shoes and feel part of whatever they’re experiencing? And, most importantly of all, do your words create a sense of presence, of happening-right-now, that keeps your reader reading, engaged and primed to learn what happens next?

That’s immediacy. Those are the books that keep us reading until 2am, even though we’ve got a big presentation to deliver and an early commute. Those are the books and the characters and the worlds that stay with us. I’m prepared to bet that one or more of them is the reason you started to write… so go be that author for the reader that’s waiting to hear from you.