It's probably POV, but since I'm doing a whole series on POV, I'll assign a different sin to this slot. In children's books, especially, I think we see this second sin. So many people choose to write for children because they want to educate readers, after all.

So, I'll give the red ribbon of second place to the sin of reportage. Yep, reportage. Lot's of people call this author intrusion, or an info dump, but I think those aren't really accurate titles for the offence that's bothering me.

Authors may intrude as long as the info they're dumping into the story matters to the reader.


Here's a scene from a book written in Nate's POV. Nate, a twelve-year-old, is sitting on a snow machine waiting for his friend John to come out of his house.

John sauntered out the front door looking almost like Connie’s twin. They both wore beaver caps and Connie's long braid was hidden behind her back. John was a year younger and a couple of inches shorter than his sister, but both were dark with almond-shaped eyes and built like typical Aleuts—squat and strong.

Nate had the same olive complexion but he was taller, taking after his Indian father instead of his Aleut mother. And then he had the gray eyes. Who knew where they came from? Some European ancestor who'd come to fish the rich Alaskan waters, Connie always said.

Now that's not a total slip out of POV because I’m not telling the reader anything that the POV character doesn't know. Nate knows what Connie and John look like. And he knows what he looks like.

But a twelve-year-old boy is not likely to be sitting on his snow machine thinking, "John and Connie look like twins. And you can tell they're Aleuts because Aleuts are, after all, squat and strong." Those thoughts would never go through his head. He already knows what he and his friends look like and he wouldn't be sitting there contemplating it.

So I did intrude into the story to tell the readers what the kids looked like. I did break out of Nate's POV to dump in some information.

But the reader doesn’t care. He wants to know what the characters look like. So author intrusion is not always a bad thing.

Reportage is a sin not because the author intrudes but because it's boring


Reportage is when the author barges into the story like the field reporter on the six o'clock news.

John was a year younger and a couple of inches shorter than his sister, but both were dark with almond-shaped eyes and built like typical Aleuts—squat and strong. The Aleut people had settled the Aleutian chain some 4000 years earlier. Frozen corpses had been found intact which showed the bone structure peculiar to the race and it had changed very little in the last 4000 years. Their work had changed very little, too. They still lived off the land on a diet that consisted of mostly fish, caribou, and moose meat. In some areas they ate seals and in other areas, whales. They ate whatever Mother Nature served up just as they had been doing for the last 4000 years.

"Hey," John said when he saw Nate. "Let's go to the gym and shoot hoops."

What has the history of the Aleut people to do with the story? Nothing. It doesn't explain anything the reader needs to know. And especially when you're writing for children you need to skip the parts that aren't part of the story. Young readers don't want a history lesson. They want to follow the characters on some great adventure.

It's possible to write a story where the readers would need to know about the diet of the Aleut people. Maybe the characters get stuck out in the wilderness and the reader needs to believe that characters know how to survive off the land because their people have been doing it for two thousand years.

But when the boys are about to play basketball together that would not be the time to put this information in. And if it were needed later, there'd be a better way to get it across, rather than dumping it as if you're writing a documentary for the Science channel.

We'll look at dribbling information into our stories as we maintain forward movement in another article.