Despite having taken every single literature class I had the opportunity to take throughout high school, I was well into college before I ever heard the term “diegesis.” I can only assume this is because my high school teachers were afraid of having to explain it. I completely sympathize with this. It’s a great word which has the potential to clarify some really interesting and helpful features of storytelling, but it’s become so ridiculously muddled by different industries using it in different ways that any attempts to define it in a general sense will leave you with little more than a migraine to show for your efforts. But it’s a really cool word! It’s fun to say, and once you have a faint grasp of what it might mean, it becomes a critical tool in describing why some stories feel immersive and others don’t. So let’s muddy the waters even further by adding our own definition to the pile, and try to explain just what in the hell this word means.

To do that, we’re going to leave the world of literature for a moment and explore how the term is used in a few other areas. We’ll then return to the world of books and talk about what all this means for your efforts to make readers of your novel begin to dissociate completely by the end of chapter one.

Movie scores

The first time I ever heard this term used was actually in the context of movie soundtracks. In film, an element of the story is called diegetic if it is being experienced by the characters themselves. Something is non-diegetic, on the other hand, if it’s only experienced by the audience. So those swelling chords you hear in the background of the emotional final moments of your favorite rom-com are non-diegetic… unless the lovers are reuniting in a concert hall, or the scene beforehand showed one of them putting on a Spotify playlist called, “songs for when your ex that you’re not really over shows up at your door in the rain to tell you he was fool to ever leave you”. Diegetic music is music that the characters can hear, whereas non-diegetic music exists only to guide or enhance the audience’s emotional state.

Take a minute to sit with that definition and get comfortable with it, because it will be the least confusing explanation we visit today.

Feeling ok? No migraine yet?

Great, let’s move on.

Video game UIs

Game design folks like to talk about things being either intra- or extradiegetic. To me, this terminology is a little more intuitive than diegetic vs. non-diegetic, because the word diegesis comes from a Greek word meaning “to narrate.” Everything in the story is somehow part of the narrative, so to say something is non-diegetic feels weird to me. But things can certainly be internal or external with respect to that narration, which is basically what the terms intradiegetic and extradiegetic mean.

Similar to the film world, these terms describe the difference between things that are experienced only by the player (extradiegetic) and things that take place within the world of the game (intradiegetic). It’s about whether something is part of the game world, or just a UI laid over top of it, visible only to the player.

Here’s where we can start to see how diegesis, used correctly, can make a story feel more immersive. Remember in my review of Firewatch, when I talked about how much I love the map? It’s a literal paper map that you can pull up in your hand, even while you’re walking. It doesn’t pause the game, and if you leave it zoomed out, you can still see around you while you’re holding it. You can also pull up a compass in your off-hand, which you can also hold just by itself. As you explore, your character annotates the map, adding landmarks and circling important areas as you find your way around. This map system is entirely intradiegetic. You, the player, are not the only person consulting a map – your character is also consulting it, and is wasting just as much time as you are standing around in the middle of the woods trying to figure out which way he’s facing. This is one of the things that makes Firewatch such an immersive game. (In fact, another blogger actually did a really great article about diegesis in the context of this exact game! He’s got some gifs in there showing how the UI operates, too; if you’ve never played it before, take a look.)

A lot of games will make the method you use to get the map intradiegetic, while making the process of actually looking at it extradiegetic. Another of my favorite games, Alien: Isolation, serves as a good example of this. The game has you collect updates to the map at kiosks placed around the world – an intradiegetic explanation for why the map exists and how you’re updating it. However, the game will pause when you pull up the map, which opens in an interface that does not exist in the world experienced by the character you’re playing. You don’t have to be careful to unfold the map quietly while you crouch under a table, lest the rustling noise summon the Alien. In fact, most of the time when I open the map in that game, it’s not because I’m lost – it’s because I’m on the verge of an anxiety attack and I need a damn break. So, while getting the map feels immersive and realistic, you can’t use the map without stopping time and interacting with a UI that reminds you that you’re sitting at home covered in Cheeto dust listening to a computer fan that sounds like it’s about to break the sound barrier.

Meanwhile, the motion tracker in Alien: Isolation is highly intradiegetic. Not only does it exist within the game world, but it’s operating even when you can’t see it. Your controller will vibrate when the tracker detects something, whether you have it pulled up in front of you or not. And not only does it not pause the game when you pull it up, but there’s actually a button to toggle whether your eyes are focused on the motion tracker or your surroundings. Do you see now why I love this game so much? It’s so immersive that I am truly on the verge of peeing myself just writing this. (And if you want to hear more about Alien: Isolation’s awesome UI design, check out this great video analysis I ran across while researching this.)

You can probably start to see now how the degree of diegesis is a conscious choice made by the design team – not just a vague consequence of aesthetic design, but a knob that is deliberately being turned in order to make the degree of immersion work for the audience experience you’re trying to craft.

Diegesis vs. Mimesis

While researching the above section on video games, I came across an alternate set of definitions in this article about diegesis in escape room design. The author defines diegetic elements of a game as things that seem like they could reasonably exist within the game universe, as we’ve already established. In addition to this, mimetic elements are those that not only could exist, but make sense. They are, as the author of the article puts it, “cohesive to the game world’s representation of reality.” So the use of the map in Firewatch would be both diegetic and mimetic. It makes both aesthetic and practical sense. In Alien: Isolation, however, the map is diegetic, but non-mimetic. The interface looks kind of like you’d expect it to if you were looking at the map kiosk itself, but there’s no rationalizing the random stoppage of time when you pull it up. It makes sense aesthetically, but not practically.

For an excellent explanation of how diegesis and mimesis apply to the world of escape room design, I highly recommend checking out the article linked above. The author makes some great points about how to use these concepts in crafting a world that strikes an appropriate balance between realism and entertainment, which is highly relevant to novelists as well as escape room designers.

Literature

Literature is where the definitions really start to get fuzzy. Book people don’t just care about something being either diegetic or not, or even diegetic vs. memetic. No, we had to go and make it even more complicated by defining layers of diegesis. When we’re talking in the context of actually telling a story, diegesis goes way, way beyond a question of aesthetics. We’re dealing with narrative and framing now, not just aesthetic cohesion: elements with far-reaching implications that impact the very fabric of the story you’re trying to tell.

First, let’s tackle the question of the narrator: who they are, and where they sit relative to the story taking place.

An extradiegetic narrator is one who is not a character. To get your head around this, try to answer this question: who is narrating the Harry Potter series? No one, right? And yet, the words are still there on the page. It’s from Harry’s POV, but the person narrating Harry’s POV isn’t really a person at all. They have no story of their own, nor any place in his. The narrator does not exist within the narrative itself; the narrator is extradiegetic.

Meanwhile, an intradiegetic narrator does exist within the narrative. They are a character in the story itself. They may or may not be a character participating in the story, but it’s clear that the story is being told by someone. There are a few sub-designations here as well. Autodiegetic means that the narrator is also the protagonist. Most (but not all!) first-person stories fall into this category. If the narrator is a character in the story but not the protagonist (like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, or Death in The Book Thief), they are homodiegetic. If the narrator is not part of the story at all, they’re heterodiegetic. You see this one in a lot of older works, like fairytales. Many of these acknowledge that they are being narrated by someone, possibly even someone who exists in the same world as the other characters, but not someone who participates in the story itself. This reddit thread breaks down all of these different terms really nicely.

So, that’s your narrator. You can see by now what a confusing mess this has turned into. There’s a huge amount of overlap and potential for mix-ups between these terms already. But buckle in, because we also have the additional question of how the narrator frames the story. It’s time to start layering.

If a story has a secondary story layered on top to explain why the primary story is being told, that secondary story is what we call metadiegetic. For example, a book that opens with “this is the story of ___” could be described as metadiegetic. The narrator is calling attention to the fact that they are telling you a story. Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer has a metadiegetic narrator; the biologist tells you within the first chapter that you are reading her journal, and makes several comments that make it clear that this is not being narrated in real time, but rather as a recollection.

Now, if you’ve got a story embedded within another story, that embedded story would be called hypodiegetic. One of my favorite books as a child, The Trolls by Polly Horvath, uses a hypodiegetic narrative. Aunt Sally is telling the children stories about her childhood within the context of the main story, which is about the kids getting to know Aunt Sally while she’s babysitting them. Aunt Sally’s stories about her childhood are hypodiegetic.

You can add more layers, too! The terms meta-metadiegesis and hypo-hypodiegesis exist for this exact purpose. My favorite example of this additional layering is when there is an explanation of not only why the story is being told, but why it is being read. The reader can be pulled into the context of the story – made a participant in it, even – by acknowledging not only that they are being told a story, but explaining why it is being told specifically to them. Done right, this can result in an extremely high degree of immersion and personal investment on the part of the reader. Presented at the beginning of the story, a meta-metadiegesis can act as a very compelling hook, prompting a slough of interesting questions. Presented at the end, it can serve as a fun plot twist, or part of the resolution of the story, answering questions the reader didn’t even know they had.

The terms metadiegesis and hypodiegesis are, of course, relative. Defining a narrative as one vs. the other depends on first defining what constitutes the main narrative of the story. Framed differently, the biologist’s account of her time in Area X could have ended up as hypodiegetic. It’s not, because that account constitutes the main narrative. Picturing the biologist writing all this down in a journal, and imagining that it has somehow ended up in your hands, requires an active zooming out on the part of the reader. On the flip side, Aunt Sally’s stories are hypodiegetic because we are forced to step into a secondary layer of the story as she tells them, rather than starting out there and zooming out when we are shown the context. It all has to do with framing, and how connected you want your reader to feel to each component of the story.

Notice, also, that there is a bit of an increase in psychological distance between the reader and a hypodiegetic story when compared to the main narrative, which can be used to create a nostalgic or even unreal atmosphere. Meanwhile, metadiegesis decreases psychological distance, making the reader feel immersed in, or even complicit in, the metadiegetic component of the narrative. In The Trolls, we sometimes feel like one of the children being told Aunt Sally’s stories: highly immersed in the metadiegetic layer of the narrative, while viewing the hypodiegetic component through an almost fairytale-like lens. Likewise, the diegetic layering in Annihilation makes the world of Area X feel oddly distant, but brings the world in which Area X exists uncomfortably close. This is a good example of how diegetic layering can be used to emphasize different components of your narrative, based on the tone you’re going for and the impact you want the story to have.

Basically, diegesis in literature is confusing because the term is used to address two separate literary quandaries. If you are talking about who is telling the story, you are considering the question of intra- vs. extradiegesis (and all of those extra sub-terms like hetero-, homo-, and autodiegesis). If you are talking about why they are telling the story, on the other hand, you’re worrying about meta- vs hypodiegesis. Both are important and can be used in tandem to varying degrees to make your story feel exactly, precisely the way you want it to.

So, now you know what diegesis is and why it’s such an absolute pain to define. But hopefully you also see now what a beautiful thing it can be, and have a sense of how you can use it to increase the immersion of whatever story you’re trying to tell.

Happy writing!