Writers of the f-list, Shadowbyrd needs you.
I'm having some problems with POVs. I'm writing a fic at the moment (not TW or DW), narrated by a four year old boy (obsessed with the Daleks, but that's not important just now), but I'm not quite sure how much this should limit what words I use, how complex the syntax is, that kind of thing.
I've got a bit here where he and his Dad are getting ready for a funeral.
Robin's put in his black duffle coat, the one he wears to school when it's cold, but it's hot and itchy. He tells Daddy he wants to take it off, but Daddy says he has to wear black.
"Why?
"To show we're sad." says Daddy, doing up the duffles.
"I don't know him." Robin points out.
"But it's sad that he's dead, isn't it?" says Daddy pulling it straight. It itches more than ever. Robin wriggles, but Daddy smacks his hand (doesn't hurt much, though) and tells him to stop.
"Okay, arms out like you're flying."
Robin straightens his arms, fists at the end. Daddy tries to frown. "What's this?" he asks, grabbing Robin's arm and shaking it. "This isn't flying. This," he stretches his arms out, waving his hands like little bird wings "is flying. This," he grabs and shakes Robin's arm again "is Superman."
"Superman flies." says Robin, stretching his arms out like Daddy.
"Not like birds do." says Daddy pulling the coat like this and this trying to make it look right. "Birds are better at it. Don't need to wear their underpants to fly." Robin giggles at the mention of the word. "And they did it first."
"Birds don't shoot lasers."
"Fortunately." says Daddy standing up. "Now we're going to be going to a church. It won't be like the ones we usually go to. I'll look different and what the priest says'll be different. It doesn't mean he's doing it wrong, okay? It's just different."
Saying Robin "points out" doesn't sound quite right to me because it's not a phrase I knew when I was four. However avoiding "Daddy smacks his hand lightly" (would he know and use the word "lightly"? I'm not sure) makes the sentence clunky. I was talking about this with my Mum and when I was explaining the family's backstory - he's an only child, his Mum died not long after having him and he's looked after by his Great-grandmother - she argued that he and his Dad would be really close and he'd maybe have a wider vocabularly being around adults so much (and also that his Dad wouldn't smack him, however lightly).
I'm keeping the "fortunately" in, because it doesn't reflect on the boy - he's just reporting what his Dad is saying, whether he understands it or not. I'm keeping it in the present tense because I remember using that one most when I wrote at that age. But all this means it turns out rather bland and thus far uninteresting. Kinda like I'm not just trying to write it as a four year old, but for a four year old, if you get me.
I did think about making him older so these problems would at least diminish, if not go away completely, but the whole point of the story is he doesn't understand a lot of what's going on; why he should have to wear black when he never met the person who's died, why the church is different from the one he and his Gramma go to (they're Catholic, while the funeral is at a Protestant church) and him trying to get his head around the idea of death. I'm not sure whether making him older by a couple of years, bringing him to around seven or eight, would take away from that.
I don't particularly want to have to do it as a "when I was four this happened" kind of story, because they don't work for me; I often have difficulty sorting out what happened yesterday from what happened the day before so I have a hard time believing that someone can remember what happened day to day for large chunks of their childhood. I don't want to have to to use third person omniscient, either, though I will give them a go if I can't work my way around this.
Anyway, any help you could give would be appreciated.