I'm interested to know if anyone else has tried this? I’m trying to write a novel with an eight-year-old narrator, and I’m finding it really challenging (to put it mildly!).

I've tried writing in the present tense from a child's POV, but the vocabulary I can use is so limited that it ends up reading like a children’s book.

On the other hand, if I write it from the perspective of the narrator as an adult (looking back on her childhood), it feels like the adult narrative jars with the childlike dialogue.

Has anyone had similar experiences? Any advice would be very gratefully received!

As you say, if you stick to the 'pure' eight-year-old vocabulary and voice then you are limited. I think what can work, though, is if you think in terms of the free indirect style which comes very naturally in third person: where there's an external narrator, whose voice is 'infected' by the voice and point of view of one or more of the characters, but can also slide out of that to something which we call the voice of the narrative.

So, in a first person narrative, in the background is the adult as the narrator. But that doesn't mean that the voice and point-of-view (in both the physical and emotional sense) can't slide towards child's voice as and when it suits.

This is my version of that kind of trick:

http://www.writewords.org.uk/archive/26309.asp

I don't think it need use both tenses, though. It's a nice, fluent way of keeping the two aspects of the story separate but interrelated, and personally I use it quite a lot. But you could perfectly well just do it all in past tense, sliding the psychic distance through the range from pure, distant, storytelling narrator, into close-up pure child voice and PoV, all within the same overall narrator's voice.

I blogged about psychic distance is here, by the way, if you haven't met the term:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/psychic-distance-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it.html

It is tricky, and some authors have been criticised for making their child mc's too adult - eg, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
However, some get it right, like Fanny Flagg's Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man.
I believe Memoirs Of A Geisha by Arthur Golden starts with a flashback to the main character as a young child.


It's best if you don't have to specify the child's age. It can be enough just to imply they're pre-teen and leave the reader to guess.

- NaomiM

I think that the choice of present tense must make the task more difficult by imposing more pressure to stick with the child's vocabulary and level of understanding. Maintaining both that and an adequate level of interest is quite a challenge.

L P Hartley dealt brilliantly with the problem of working through the eyes of a child in The Go-Between using first person past tense. I know that this is not contemporary fiction and that Leo was older than your eight-year-old but it's definitely worth looking at to see how he used first person in a way that combined the insight of the mature adult looking back and the naivety of the child's dialogue and experience of the events. A good illustration is in Chapter 7, starting where the farmer asks: 'Does that mean that you are alone with her sometimes?' down to 'Then I'll write it...'

Chris

I think the Booker shortlisted book Room is from the POV of a five year old boy, who lives with his mother in a grim Josef Fritzel set up.

Ditto what Chris said too about LP Hartley [my favourite book of all time, that one]

Man Booker shortlisted novel Mister Pip is told from a child's pov.

Oooh, yes, the Go-between. One of the great books.

Emma

And To Kill a Mockingbird, which is the narrator looking back but enters the child's mind very easily.

Curious Incident also, though that is slightly different as the narrator is autistic.

Thank you all so much for your help, and Emma for your links.
I really like the idea of sliding between the adult and child's voice so I can keep the child's perspective without being limited by the vocabulary - definitely something I'm going to try.

I'll have a look at all those books, too - I'm especially intrigued by the sound of The Go-Between.

Many thanks again
Susie

Roddy Doyle's 'Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha' is another brilliant one.

R x

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(10-year-old narrator - won Booker.)

There's a section in my forthcoming book that's written from a six year old girl's point of view. I wrote it in the first person present tense and then switched to the third person for that "subjective objective" feel. I just imagined it was my own daughter talking. Seemed to work OK.