Author Intrusion
A uthor intrusion is when the author inserts something into the text that the point of view (POV) character wouldn’t know. For example, we might have a POV character who is a young child, but the author might mentions something about the election that year. It is something the author, who knows everything, would know about, but the child probably wouldn’t. Generally, this is considered bad form, unless you are using an omniscient POV, which is also considered to be bad form these days. But the fact is that these things slip into our writing. We sometimes see author intrusion in books published by well known authors and as well as the manuscripts produced by wannabes. While the publishing industry usually highlights author intrusion, I can’t help but wonder if the frequency of it might tell us something. What I think it might tell us is that author intrusion doesn’t bother most people. As writers, we’re conditioned to think that author intrusion is bad. It gives us one more thing we can...