How to describe distance

[Gav]

Hey everyone.

I was wondering if anyone has any advice on how to go about measuring distance in fantasy writing.
My story is set in kind of a high fantasy setting, I guess a 'swords and sorcery' pigeon hole if I was to describe it vaguely, and I was wondering how to go about describing how far away things are. Long distance isn't so much of an issue, as describing things in very broad terms like "several days riding" or "a 3 day trek" can kind of gloss over it, but my queries are about short or middle distances.

As someone from the UK, my default thoughts are either metric or imperial (meters/centimetres or feet and inches) however i just don't think they fit well, as it seems to take me out of the story by using real-world measurements.

As an example, I have my main character huddled up in a shadowy doorway in some back ally at night as a demon is pulling its way into his world from the wall opposite. In my head the distance is about 20-30 feet away (far enough for him to hide, close enough for him to be terrified) but when I am writing 'feet' I just feel its not quite right.

So, I would leave any input or ideas that you might have on this subject.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

My choice is to use real world measurements. You could make up your own terms for everything under the sun, if you wanted ultra-realism in your setting. However, in doing so, you're asking the reader to do an awful lot of work remembering terms for this & that, terms which ultimately serve little story purpose and offer little in exchange for that extra effort.

Generally, I feel that details like these disappear into the background, much like the word "said". After all, you're writing in a modern language, aren't you? Yet, few readers will complain about your use of modern language (anachronisms aside).

 

[Malik]

I use measurements that the readers are familiar with, but only in narration. The characters in the book don't mention miles or distances, however, because they don't have any idea what a mile or a foot is. "X days' ride" or "X days' walk," or comparisons like "the length of a horse," are pretty much the standard in my fantasy world, because that's all that really matters to most people realistically.

You could make up your own terms for everything under the sun, if you wanted ultra-realism in your setting. However, in doing so, you're asking the reader to do an awful lot of work remembering terms for this & that, terms which ultimately serve little story purpose and offer little in exchange for that extra effort.

Also this.

 

[Gav]

I absolutely agree, and perhaps i wasn't so clear in my post, if not i do apologise. It wasn't so much that i was looking to create an entirely new unit of measurement, after all I want people to be able to read it and understand what it depicts, so saying something is "17 dannars across" isnt what im going for as it wouldn't always make sense without having to read up or go back and remind yourself how my special units of measurement work.

my main question was what current or historical units of measurement are easiest to relate to, but also don't conflict with a much older fashioned and fantasy style world world. Currently i have gone with feet and inches as against the metric system it is easier to judge. meters is almost just an arbitrary word describing a set distance, compared to feet which has at least a basis and an image to work from.

 

[buyjupiter]

Saying "a week's ride" vs. 140 miles (presuming 20 miles a day) would be dependent upon how your characters travel. I'd rather see "a week's ride" and a description of method of travel (messenger horse system? horse and carriage? regular horse and no baggage? dragon? llama? giant duck?), than 140 miles. It allows for more description, and you leave less questions for the reader to try and figure out. You can play with it a bit more too.

For example: "It was supposed to be a week's ride by carriage out of the city. Unfortunately, the bandits in Underbrush Forest decided to raid the major roads that week and there was a deluge the week before they set out that washed out the back ways. It took the two men ten days to reach the Castle of Aaaaarrrgggh, with many stops to replace carriage wheels and dig stones out of the horse's hooves. They planned upon reaching the castle and immediately going to the Castellan to discuss their business, but when the rain started again halfway through their journey, they had no clothes that were not covered in mud. (This is just off the top of my head and poorly written, but you get the idea.)

Also, for your example: unless you're writing about alleys in the American city sense, I might do some research into Haussman's replanning of Paris city streets and looking at descriptions of Medieval cities. Basically Haussmann had to tear down parts of Paris because the alleyways were so narrow, a person had to turn sideways to go through it. (There are probably a lot of alleys that were big enough for a horse and cart to go through, but that's what? 10-12 feet max?)

 

[Caged Maiden]

I'm just going to jot down stuff how I write it and hope it inspires your imagination:

He crossed the room in three long steps

She stood from her seat and inched backwards until her back touched the wall.

"We can be there in an hour."

The ride would take until nightfall.

"I can't make that jump, it's ten feet!" "It's eight-and-a-half. That's why I told you to run."

Three stories up, she clung to a narrow ledge.

He walked into the alley, three or four steps...

Five paces away, in the darkness...

The border town lay a full day's ride northeast.

Just outside the city wall...

The cottage lay just beyond the border. Twelve miles, too far to cover on foot.

Okay, so those are some actual measurements I use when writing. The way I figure it, feet are approximate, as are steps and paces. I think that lends itself well to a fantasy world, actually. A day's ride will be a flexible distance. In the rain, it'll be a longer trek than on a sunny day, and in a carriage, too. So, if it's twenty-four miles to another town on a paved or hard-packed dirt road, it'll always be a day's ride in good conditions, single-mounted. But, say the eighteen miles the next town is.. that might also take a full day because the terrain is terrible. I try to remember that when I write and I even have a chart with horse distance, walking distance, and carriage distance marked as a ruler measurement. I know that's a bit much, but that bok is set on a huge continent. It was more necessary than my WiP which takes place in a city and its immediate surroundings.

So body measurements are good and relatable. Remember, if you measure in leagues, acres, miles, meters, yards, etc. we all feel somewhat familiar. If you measure in sunflower stalks, Imperial Inches, dragon strides, etc. there will be a feeling of unfamiliarity that might hamper a reader's enjoyment. The thing is, there are so many wonderful real-world measurements and I often use the character's immediate surroundings to determine how they measure. If they're on a boat, being attacked, I don't use meters until it's meters you must use. I use ship lengths or say, "The cannonballs fell scant meters from their target."

Yards are an old measurement. Arrows were "...cut to a clothe yard long..." so you can always use that. Meters do sound a bit modern, but I don't think a single reader will pick at that word. Instead, they'll be picturing something they're familiar with, makes sense to them, and they will largely ignore the word, instead just picturing that cannonball missing by a small amount.

Hands for horses. It feels so weird to measure horses in another manner. I guess, "two meters at the shoulder" might work, but ... how awkward.

I personally like acres, miles, meters, strides, steps, feet, inches. Those are the ones I use because most people won't actually notice the words themselves, they'll just picture what I want them to. Hope this helps!

 

[Ruby]

Hi Gav. If you are writing a Fantasy set in the "real" world I think you would have to use units of measurement that were actually being used at that time. For example, if you set a story in Victorian England you would have to measure distances in miles, yards, feet and inches. If you mentioned kilometres, metres etc it would not ring true. On the other hand, you could make up units of distance for your fantasy world and perhaps add a footnote for your readers explaining the distances in terms of current units of measurement.
However, as Malik and Caged Maiden demonstrate above, there are ways of skirting round this. I also, recently, got bogged down in worrying about units of currency being used in a historical setting, in terms of current value, then decided to leave it kind of vague and just let the traveller pay the bill!

 

[Gav]

thanks everyone. I really appreciate the input, and after looking through all your posts I think perhaps i have just got bogged down in something that isn't particularly important but due to me thinking about it i have started to over think it.

Much appreciated!

 

[Butterfly]

Miles, Yards, Hands, Leagues, Cubits, Furlongs.

Acres and Hectares, are related to area rather than length.

 

[Caged Maiden]

currency has been discussed on threads before. You might search those old threads because we gave some good advice on them. With units of currency, measurements, time, etc. it can get silly quickly if you confuse the reader and look like a generic world if you go too simple.

My best advice, would be to keep it pertinent. For example if a character is very wealthy and outside his element, he may be traveling with gold coins (as one of my elves did in a human town) and it draws unnecessary attention to him. That was pertinent to the following events, so I detailed it. In my WiP, my character bribes a door man and simply cups a handful of coins in his palm and after shaking hands, the coins are gone. No need to describe them, a reader can guess how much it takes to gain entry.

It goes back to ship-lengths... a reader can surmise what they will form the character's using immediate things by which to measure the distance. Now, for example, that was from the POV of my MC, a soldier, not a sailor. If I was writing a sailor POV, I'd research the correct terms for sea distances.

The measurements you ise should always help define the character from whose eyes we are seeing the scene. When my swordsman got into a fight, he didn't think, "THat guy's two meters away", he thought, "That guy's just outside of measure". It all helps the reader know the character and picture the scene accurately, lending not only authenticity to the world, but credence to the character.

 

[Malik]

Around here, where I live, traffic is so jacked up that we talk in terms of time instead of distance. It's 11 miles to town, but depending on the time of day and whether or not there's construction (we have four seasons, here: Almost Winter, Winter, Winter's Almost Over, and Road Construction) it's anywhere from a 15-minute trip to a ninety-minute trip.

Similarly, in my books, in the summer it may be a day's ride to the next town, but during the spring thaw, when the rivers are swollen, trees are down from the winter's ice storms, and the roads are knee-deep in mud, it could be three days or more. So distance doesn't really matter, pragmatically. The only people who'd care about the actual, measurable distance are people who would be building something between them -- a good road, an aqueduct -- and would need to order materials, or someone building a really specific map. To 99% of the people in a pre-industrial society, measurements of intangibles, like physical distance and minutes, have no practical meaning.

 

[wordwalker]

I'm with Caged, and also Malik: it's better to think in different terms than precise units, when you can.

I've always thought that saying "twenty feet" --or "forty quibbaults" for that matter, no matter how authentically you've spelled out your own measurement-- creates the impression that you've stopped time to lay a ruler out over the scene. Of course it's really a a snapshot, but I'd rather look for anything that puts things in smaller numbers. Not "twenty feet" but "two stories," "five paces" or "bare instants" away depending on the context-- and if those don't seem like the same distance, I think a comfortable round figure's more important than conveying some extra feet more or less.

Any phrasing with larger numbers just sounds too picky.

 

[buyjupiter]

Not "twenty feet" but "two stories," "five paces" or "bare instants" away depending on the context-- and if those don't seem like the same distance, I think a comfortable round figure's more important than conveying some extra feet more or less.

Any phrasing with larger numbers just sounds too picky.

Emphasis mine.

I think that using anything over a "few" (however you phrase it), leads the reader into thinking that's too precise. And I know that one of the ways I key into if someone's lying to me is if they're using a precise measurement of time ("it took me 37 minutes to get home from work today") or distance when there's no practical reason for it (i.e. they're not talking about construction work). Most of the time it's generic white lies, or embellishments to make a story sound more important than it really is.

But if your reader's thinking it's too precise of a measurement and it's in a character's POV, then you might in just the slightest way be making that character just the tiniest bit unreliable.

 

[wordwalker]

Hmm, didn't think of it in those terms, but that's part of it. It all goes back to the mind preferring to find easy-to-manage approximations and numbers, often by shifting to a larger unit-- much like we'd rather change a pocket of dollar bills into a $10 or two.

And in conversation, it is a way of showing deception, or sometimes character. I can honestly hear myself answering that question with "It took me thirty...five minutes, yes," just to show I'm more of a clock-watcher, but most people would stop at "thirty" or "half an hour" and very few would go up to "37."

 

[skip.knox]

In pre-clock days, people did mark time in hours, but they were flex hours. Twelve of them were in a day, meaning sunrise to sunset, regardless of how long the day was. They did not say "ten o'clock" obviously, because there were no clocks. But something could be two hours later than now. Not everyone agreed on how long that would be, though. Workers worked sunrise to sundown.

If you happened to live near a monastery, the monks there kept closer time because of the cycle of prayers, so in your world you could work out something like vespers, nones, etc. This was less true in towns (before about 1400 when mechanical clocks started to be in vogue and a mark of civic pride), but the churches did ring bells as a call to worship.

As for distance, people did measure. The Romans measured in miles. But how? Well, they had surveying equipment but that all vanished with the Empire and medieval people made do with less precise methods. But they still said it was so many miles from A to B. I don't know of many references that spoke of distance in terms of time. There were way too many variables in play for that to be a useful measure.

One other point worth noting. One of the many peculiarities of the modern mind is our obsession with precision in numbers. This was not true in the Middle Ages. People rounded. Demographers noticed this a long time ago when they noted strange groupings of age at 20, 30, 40 and so on. People reported age (in this case, age at death, but we have secondary records, too) in round numbers. Time of day, too. Chroniclers never say the battle began at 10:45. Morning, midday, afternoon, sunset. That was pretty much it, because that was all the significance that was needed.

Once clocks came around, all that changed.

 

[MVV]

Well, I think that imperial measurements are great. They are comprehensible for the reader and they can feel authentic in a fantasy setting - using feet and inches makes sense to me... and if you write 'swords and sorcery' stuff while using Medieval Europe as a referential setting (mmm, do you), then it's absolutely cool because feet and inches is exactly what people used. If you want to make it a little bit more exotic for an Anglo-Saxon reader, you may take a look at what was used around Europe and around the world before the metric system.

What about Russia, for example? Obsolete Russian units of measurement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Caged Maiden]

one more note about timekeeping... candles can keep time. Churches often employed candles that burned at a predictable rate to time hours, then they'd ring the bells. In my WiP, set in 1575, most people don't have timepieces, except the wealthy. However, the bells toll on the hour at the cathedral. Anyone could buy a candle to keep time. It's probably not the best use of money, but if time is important to the story, you can do without clocks.

Also, I'll just say again, the easier you make the wording of these measurements, the easier it'll be on the reader. If it isn't important to know how much time passed, I usually say, "The afternoon sun cast long shadows..." to signify time has passed and it's later that day. I think the less precise, the less a reader is pulled out of the story by the words themselves.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

In my trad fantasies I mainly stay Imperial, but with some variations. For example I would talk about paces instead of yards (after all a yard was the stride length of a certain royal to begin with). And I would use leagues instead of miles. Technically a league is three miles, but it simply goes better with the genre. For time I would usually use bells, eg three bells had just rung. It is more strongly associated with ships, but works in a village with a clock tower or similar.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[CupofJoe]

I've read a couple of stories originally written in French and then translated in to English [with varying degrees of success]. Both of these used metric units in a fantasy setting. It didn't seem out of place or incongruous. But it did take a bit of mental gymnastics to convert 60km in to about 40miles etc. I think it is all down to what you are used to. I would guess that Americans and British [and other English speakers/readers?] are more comfortable with the Imperial system [even though we cant agree on what it really is] and those with a greater familiarity with the metric system don't see any wrongness in using that.

 

[Nameback]

Ancient Roman units of measurement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

People have been using measurements like "miles" and "feet" for a very long time, so there's nothing anachronistic about using them in your story. I agree it's best to round the numbers quite a bit. Still, Roman measurements were pretty damn precise when it came to things like engineering--they had to be, in order to build things as impressive as the aqueducts.

Time is iffier, but people still had hours, and used things like "half an hour" or "quarter of an hour." Any more precise than that is probably unlikely. Things like noon and sundown are appropriate to pre-clock worlds.