In a couple of weeks I’m running a workshop for adults on how to write for children. So this afternoon I’ve been composing my thoughts and putting a few things together. There’s a lot that I don’t know, but there’s also a lot I won’t be able to fit in. I’ve decided to focus on the stuff that I do know and will also be able to fit in. I think that’s a good tactic.

Which leaves two things for me to rant about here, which I’m going to call, ‘Writing that really annoys me.’ Both these things particularly annoy me when they crop up in children’s books.

1. My biggest one is beautifully summed up by a cartoon I found a week or so ago:

Why can’t we stop people writing novels in the present tense?

Sometimes I can see what the writer is trying to do, and, yes, there are some very good novels written in the present tense. Not many, but some. And they are good despite being in the present tense. They would be even better if they were written properly, in the past tense, the way that humans have understood stories for centuries. I know it’s just a convention, but it’s pretty well entrenched and there is no good reason to muck about with it.

2. Journals. I have read (or tried to read) so many children’s books which at some point near the beginning have a passage that goes, roughly, something like this: I’m writing this to set down exactly what happened in my amazing story. Maybe someday, somebody will read it. Who knows. There are parts that I couldn’t possibly have seen myself, but those bits I’ve pieced together from what other people told me. Or I’ve made them up.

Just tell me a story. Don’t pretend that somebody has written all about it in a diary and that I’ve somehow found that diary and I’m reading it. A variation on this is the ‘Police Report Narrator’. Books that use that little trick have a passage near the beginning that goes something like this: I’ve been a detective for 27 years but I’ll ever forget this case. I’m going to set everything out in this official report, hoping that my seniors will know what to do. I promise this is all true and I’ll try to be fair to everybody. I was at my desk late one night when I got a strange phone call…

To top it all, this week somebody gave me a children’s book to read which began with the Police Report Narrator trick, and then the policeman writing the report very quickly explained that he’d found a diary, and that the whole story was set out this diary that I really needed to see if I was ever going to understand what really happened…

I threw the book against a wall. But at least it wasn’t all written in the present tense.

OK, I’m fully expecting plenty of you to disagree with me on these two points and plenty more of you to wonder why I seem to mind so much when they’re just little things I should be able to get over. That’s fine. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Joe Craig, present tense, rant, writing