Writing Children in Adult Novels
- By: Jessica Faust | Date: Feb 02 2021
Writing children can make or break your novel. I’m not to talking writers of children’s books. I’m talking to adult writers, writing adult novels.
Far too often I’m reading a submission and it’s the point of view of the child that kills the book for me and leads to rejection. Children don’t and can’t sound, well, childish. And yet somehow, in order to show they’re children, that’s what we do to them.
If you plan to include children in your novel you need to be reading books with children in them. Expand your repertoire to include middle grade and young adult fiction–books that feature children the age you want to write. Understand how a child can sound like a child and still sound real.
If you have done the research and still find yourself struggling to make a child sound like something other than a caricature of a child ask yourself if they need a POV at all. Or if you need the child there at all.
I don’t know if merely reading other books with children in them would suffice. In my experience, at least, a large proportion of books with children in them or about children suffer from “stilted child character” syndrome. Apparently, most adults’ memory of what it was like to be a child is quite warped or faded. I think if you’re going to be writing children into your novel, you need to get to know some actual children. Preferably children of the exact age about which you’re writing. (You might replace also the word “child” in the foregoing with “horse,” “dog,” or “chicken,” too.)
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