I love learning the names for editor-y things. Like parallel construction and hiatus break and inciting incident and rhetorical device. Sometimes I make up names for problems I encounter when I don’t know the Official Editor-y Terminology—like name-calling and narrative questions and generic character nouns. I’m not too proud to look like a goof. I’m just trying to communicate.

Of course, sometimes I learn phrases that aren’t all that helpful, like breaking the fictive dream, which is brilliant stuff but, like the situation it purports to describe, has the effect of bringing many readers to a screeching halt. What did she just say? And what does it mean?

Like deep POV—have mercy. (I still haven’t figured out what I think about that one, but you’ll be the first to know when I do.) Or authorial intrusion, the concept of which I thought I had a clear understanding, just not a name by which to call it.

Until I got a slap-down from an author.

I started it, of course. 🙂

The manuscript we were working on was full of narrative questions. It was told in first person and propelled forward by the narrator asking a bunch of questions at the protagonist’s every turning point. On every stinkin’ page (that’s hyperbole, mine), usually several at a time (not hyperbole). Like this*:

I looked at my father’s flashy new uniform. Did he want me to join the gang alongside him? Or was he simply trying to keep an eye on me? Would he kill me if I said no?

That’s three questions clustered together. Narrative question clusters like this happened, sometimes, every few paragraphs and definitely every few pages. When I mentioned it on the first pass, the author sort of blew me off, so on the next pass I highlighted all the question clusters. Why? Because folks tend to not believe Your Editor when she says they’re doing a thing unless she shows them. So to prove the point and shut down argument, Your Editor shows them the data.

It was a very colorful manuscript.

I suggested the author reduce the number of these narrative question clusters by 75 percent. There were so many of them, it just jumped off the page and was annoying. I’m not sure where this sort of thing comes from, frankly. But, hey, I’m here to help.

Next I encouraged the author to recast many of the questions into statements. Like this:

I looked at my father in his flashy new uniform. Maybe he really did want me by his side. Or it could be a way to buy my silence. Saying no was out of the question—he’d kill me for sure.

Other times I compromised by editing the several questions into just one. Like this:

I looked at my father’s flashy new uniform and wondered what he really wanted of me. Would he be angry if I said no?

That last one—even though it was a compromise—got me the slap-down.

The author deleted wondered what he really wanted and added back the other questions. (An aside: Your Editor doesn’t care if you don’t like her rewrite suggestions; it doesn’t bother her in the least. She’s offered up a lot of better lines than this one that smart authors rejected.) The author changed it all back and left me a note that said wondered what he really wanted was authorial intrusion.

I confess I said few bad words, dear reader. Then I scratched my head. Maybe I was wrong. (The horror!) So I googled authorial intrusion, of course. (Duh.)

• I read that it is something you should avoid.
• I read it’s something authors did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but we don’t do it now.
• I read that it’s OK in omniscient POV.
• I read it’s OK if it’s intentional.
• I read long lists of things that were cited as authorial intrusion, none of which were correct.

But we’ve talked about the dangers of trusting a) self-styled experts and b) the Internet many times. You know this, right? Just because it’s there on someone’s web page doesn’t make it right.

So let’s start here: authorial intrusion (sometimes called narrative intrusion) is a literary device (i.e., specifically chosen to create an effect**) in which the narrator intentionally steps away from the story she is telling and addresses the reader directly, as an aside. She might refer to “the book in your hands” or to the sadness of the tale she’s about to tell. She might say something like, “And then, dear reader, I kissed him.”

Authorial intrusion was popular in literature until the twentieth century. Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Nathaniel Hawthorne—all these and many others employed it. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is the textbook example. Here, Jane is the first-person narrator, but Brontë often intrudes and speaks directly to the reader. For example, chapter 11 begins:

A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote, with such large figured papering on the walls as inns have; such a carpet, such furniture, such ornaments on the mantel-piece … All this is visible to you by the light of an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, and by that of an excellent fire, near which I sit in my cloak and bonnet …

Gosh, I loved that book back in the day.

Authorial intrusion can add a quaintness, a comedic element, a winsomeness. And yes, this literary device is still used today. Roald Dahl used it in The Witches (1983), which includes a (fictional!) author’s note, “A Note About Witches”:

In fairy-tales, witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks, and they ride on broomsticks. But this is not a fairy-tale. This is about real witches. … if you remember [this] always, then you might just possibly manage to escape from being squelched before you are very much older.

Lemony Snicket (a pseudonym used by author David Handler) employs it in his middle grade novels A Series of Unfortunate Events. Here’s a bit of The Bad Beginning (1999), chapter 1:

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.

There’s another intrusion here: Lemony Snicket is also a character in the book, as well as the narrator. You see this trick in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (the 1973 book, not the movie, charming as the latter is), which is filled with asides by the narrator.

You see authorial intrusion also in The Book Thief, Markus Zusak’s 2005 novel in which Death is the narrator. This is from page 309:

In all honesty (and I know I’m complaining excessively now), I was still getting over Stalin, in Russia. The so-called second revolution—the murder of his own people.

Then came Hitler.

They say that war is death’s best friend, but I must offer you a different point of view … To me, war is like the new boss who expects the impossible. He stands over your shoulder repeating one thing, incessantly: “Get it done, get it done.” So you work harder.  You get the job done. The boss, however, does not thank you. He asks for more.

Often I try to remember the strewn pieces of beauty I saw in that time … I plow through my library of stories.

In fact, I reach for one now.

We could go on and on like this, but the fact is, authorial intrusion is a literary device. It can be used to great effect. Remember the Dragnet franchise? “The story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.” The narrator spoke directly to the viewing (or listening) audience. In the theater there’s also a technique in which a character addresses the audience. It’s called breaking the fourth wall, and, yes, that’s the authorial intrusion literary device at work.

So you see, it’s OK to use authorial intrusion whether you’re writing in the 1800s or the 2000s. A literary device is not an error.

But my author was of the something-you-should-avoid school of authorial intrusion, and was applying it to … to I don’t know what s/he saw in that revised sentence. Characters are allowed to have opinions and to express them, they’re allowed to wonder if their interpretation of events is correct as they move through the plot. What made the author call it authorial intrusion? I’m not sure, but now that I’ve done all this research, I’ve begun to think s/he’d read one of those articles with the long list of errors that were being called authorial intrusion.

In fact, these errors are just crappy writing. Your Editor points them out on a regular basis. Here are some examples:

1 The point-of-view character knows, hears, or sees something he or she can’t possibly know, hear, or see. (I see this all the time; I’d call it a POV error.)

2 A character does something implausible that arises from the author’s omniscient knowledge of the story. (It’s a continuity error. Or a lack of foreshadowing. Or simply bad plotting.)

3 Characters who figure things out too soon or otherwise get ahead of the plot. (Bad structure; needs more tension or foreshadowing.)

4 Shoehorning in some obscure piece of knowledge, a famous quote, or a strongly held opinion. (Just say no to soapboxing; it’s bad writing. Perhaps you failed to catch it in that crappy first draft.)

5 Slipping a piece of backstory into the narrative. (Where else is it supposed to go? Perhaps it could be more gracefully done—Your Editor has been known to tell authors, “You’re stepping on your own action here”—but, again, this is just bad layering, bad tension, or, as I’ve said, crappy writing.)

5a Slipping a piece of backstory into the dialogue. (When two characters tell each other something they already know just so readers will know it, too, it’s narrative masquerading as dialogue, and it’s just plain ugly. Don’t do it.)

See the difference? These are writing craft errors, reader. They reveal inconsistency or lack of planning; they’re telling when you should show; they’re mistakes in characterization or POV or layering of details or plotting. Your Editor (or perhaps the line editor) will help you fix them. Your Editor just objects to your calling it authorial intrusion as if this perfectly lovely manuscript was magically writing itself until you, Ms. Author, came along and inserted this mistake.

* You do understand I’ve changed details in this story, right?
** A flashback, for example, is a literary device.

Thanks to Joyce Magnin for some great conversations, suggestions, and insights on this topic.

Tweet: It’s a literary device, Dear Reader.
Tweet: Authorial intrusion can add a quaintness, a comedic element, a winsomeness. And yes, this literary device is still used today.