3 ideas
Fiction works by producing a dream in the reader's mind: a sequence of imagined sensory events vivid enough to feel real and uninterrupted enough to hold attention. Concrete, specific detail makes the dream vivid, and unbroken attention keeps it continuous. Anything that pulls the reader out to notice the writer, the words, or the page weakens the fiction's effect.
Gardner lists specific errors that jolt the reader awake. These include careless or ungrammatical prose, needless shifts in psychic distance, filtering phrases such as 'she noticed' that put a perceiver between reader and event, mannered or showy style, and sentimentality, which is emotion the story asks for but has not earned.
The narrator's closeness to a character's consciousness runs on a scale. At one end is a distant, panoramic view ('It was winter of the year 1853'). At the other is full immersion in the character's thoughts ('Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes'). Skilled writers move along this scale deliberately and gradually to control intimacy and emphasis. Abrupt, unmotivated jumps disorient the reader and break the dream.