15 KiB
[D] Rationally Writing 39 - Children in Fiction
-
Author: u/DaystarEld Pokémon Professor*
-
Score: 31
-
Created: 2018-01-13T22:15:53
Post:
Comments:
u/Kuiper [+23] (4 hours later)
On the topic of speech, I think it can actually be more realistic for kids to speak with a more elevated diction and vocabulary than their adult counterparts might.
Speaking from my own experience, as a kid, my view was mostly that the point of having a large vocabulary was to use the biggest words possible and impress listeners with unfamiliar words. At the age of 9, whenever I was in a conversation with someone and they had to interrupt me to ask for the definition of a word I'd just used, I took it as a positive sign, because it meant that I was winning at some imaginary game I'd constructed in my head where every conversation was a contest to see who could speak in the most grandiloquent way possible.
As I got older, I realized that the purpose of having a expansive vocabulary wasn't so that I could use the most complex words, but so that I could use the right words: sometimes, this means using bigger words when they remove ambiguity, but preferring smaller words when they can communicate an idea just as effectively. Under this model, any moment where someone has to stop you to ask you for the definition of a word shouldn't be taken as a sign of success, but a possible sign of failure on your part, because it can be an indication that your choice of words has failed to successfully communicate the idea that you were trying to convey to the listener.
I don't know very many adults who talk like Artemis Fowl. But I've met plenty of 12-year-olds who talk like Artemis Fowl (and I was one of them). Some kids (especially a lot of "smart kids") are under the mistaken notion that the point of language is to show off how smart you are. Most adults seem to understand that the point of language is to effectively communicate ideas, rather than to seem impressive. (I like to think of use of buzzwords as one of the exceptions that proves the rule, as people who talk about "corporate synergy" are probably more interested in seeming impressive and cultivating an aura of eminence than actually communicating whatever idea they're talking about.)
Also connected to this is the notion that using more words to explain an idea makes you sound smarter. (As a child, I delivered lots of rambling explanations that were more about demonstrating how many facts I had memorized about a subject, rather than actually trying to explain it in a way that the listener would understand.) In reality, the people who have the greatest understanding of a subject are often the ones most capable of delivering a concise and easily-understood explanation.
This also connects to a broader point, which is that certain speech patterns (such as demonstrating a large vocabulary) can be a form of signaling, and a strong desire to signal intelligence is often a sign of immaturity. (For examples, see /r/iamverysmart.) People who are actually well-read usually don't go out of their way to appear erudite.
(As an autobiographical note, one of the things that helped me overcome this childhood mentality was living abroad during from age 13 while my dad was working at a Chinese university. One of the reasons I enjoyed using big words and speaking "impressively" as a kid was that using words that not everybody understood allowed me to feel a certain sense of intellectual superiority. When I was outside the US, I was confronted with the fact (obvious now in retrospect) that there were plenty of people whose English vocabulary wasn't as large as mine, but who still outclassed me intellectually; the fact that I could speak English in a more extravagant manner than a Chinese physicist didn't mean I was "smarter" than he was.)
One thing I'd like to do more in my writing is portray children's misuse of language. Partly, I just enjoy this idea because it's often "cute" and can be a source of fun and/or funny moments, but I think that the way that children (mis)speak can often reveal a lot about their understanding of language, which can indicate how they think. As an autobiographical example, at around age 3, I had the following exchange with my mother:
Mom: Did Daddy go to the store?
Me: Daddy goed to the store.
Mom: Daddy went to the store.
Me: Daddy wented to the store.
As a 3-year-old, I apparently understood conjugation of verbs well enough to intuit that the past tense of "go" was "goed," and, went confronted with the new verb "went," assumed that I had to conjugate it in the same way. It might be a bit of revisionist history, and odds are pretty good that the experience of "Junior understands verb conjugation" is about as unique as "Junior learns how to walk," but there's a part of me that wants to draw a logical through-line from that point of understanding verb conjugation and my career today as a professional writer. At the very least, it was an enjoyable and memorable moment (not for me, but memorable enough for my mother to recollect the incident and tell me about it decades later), and there's a good chance that specific moment altered my mother's understanding of what kind of child I was. (To point out the obvious and explain how this pertains directly to the topic of writing, the job of an author is to control and guide the reader's understanding of the characters and inform the audience about kind of people they are, and it's often done through small moments like these.)
On the topic of character ages, one of the things I've gleaned from conversations with YA authors and editors is that kids (and teens) want to read stories about characters who talk, act, and think like they do, but they also want their heroes to be a few years older than they are so they can "look up" to them and have a sense of "I'll get there one day." (That sense of "I'll get there one day" can also help young readers overcome a sense of envy that can arise from the realization that the characters they're reading about have lives that are much more exciting and interesting than their own.) One of the effects of this is that you have a lot of YA characters who behave like 14-year-olds but are canonically 16 years old. (The same is true of some middle grade fiction, to a lesser extent, where the characters' canonical age is 1-2 years higher than their behavior would imply.) I think that this also can make it easier for adult readers to connect to these characters, because while many adult readers are fully capable of sympathizing with a 14-year-old character, they find it easier to connect with a character who is reported to be 16 years old in the text than they would if that character had a reported age of 14. (A similar idea is expressed in this post about how adults might have an easier time connecting with TV shows and movies about teenagers when those characters are portrayed by actors in their 20's, because it makes the stakes feel more real when the characters on screen look more physically mature.)
u/Mingablo [+4] (17 hours later)
I was also a child who liked to talk like that. I thought it made me sound smart. Then I realised it was stupid around the end of high school and switched to speaking that way ironically. This was not necessarily better.
u/DaystarEld [+1] Pokémon Professor (a day later)
I really like your description of certain types of children using big words to sound smarter, and just realized it should probably be a character flaw that Red's grown out of, or at least a criticism of him that Blue has said before. It seems difficult to make a main character have that flaw while also thinking of high level and precise concepts, but maybe I should experiment with it to see if it can come off without being too annoying :)
u/DaystarEld [+6] Pokémon Professor (2 minutes later)
Hey everyone, finally got the latest episode edited and up! This week we discuss children in fiction, including what makes them realistic and why reactions to them can vary so widely. Hope you enjoy!
Time Stamps
0:31 Advantages of child protagonists
4:43 "Children don't act like that."
16:00 Keeping smart/mature children children
20:37 Evergreen methods
26:40 Predictive Processing and "Wonder"
34:33 Pokemon: The Origin of Species
u/AmeteurOpinions [+5] Finally, everyone was working together. (16 hours later)
I’m going to have to plug The Mysterious Benedict Society, as well as its prequel/sequels, as excellent examples of books about clever children, and children who are each clever in different ways.
u/DaystarEld [+1] Pokémon Professor (a day later)
I'll definitely look into it, thanks!
u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (5 minutes later)
Audible ad/book recommendation text:
This week I'm recommending IT, by Stephen King. While the movie that was recently released was a well made adaptation, it's impossible for any single movie, or even pair of movies, to capture the world and characters of the book, which is about 450 thousand words long, almost half the length of the Harry Potter series. The reason I'm recommending it this week is because IT is like few other books in capturing the feeling of being children: the friendship, the fear, the tragedy, the lack of control, the imagination, all of it.
There's also an evil shapeshifting clown monster, of course, an eldritch avatar of fear that is nearly as iconic as any horror monsters out there, but that's not where I would say the heart and soul of the story is: for me that has always been the characters. The children in IT can at times be caricatures, but they're caricatures in the ways that kids can be caricatures, still developing who they are as people by committing to one dimension at at time while you watch the other two grow. And seeing them all do this together, to fight an unspeakable evil that only they can face, is fantastically done.
As a rational work, IT is middle of the road: a lot of the monster's true mechanics are left vague, and what "magic" there is in the story is the wild and unexamined kind. But there are great explanations for why it's up to the kids to deal with this instead of getting adults involved, and the characters do their best to understand their mercurial enemy and strategize against it without the gifts of particularly high intelligence or rationalist techniques. Mistakes feel organic and understandable, and there's little if any Idiot Ball holding.
Some content warnings: the book does include a lot of grotesquery, in the forms of gory deaths, including of children. There's also a sex scene near the end that squiks a lot of people out for understandable reasons. Overall though, I think IT is one of Stephen King's best works, and the first piece of fiction I think of when I think of writing realistic children. The second, incidentally, is also by Stephen King, a much shorter non-horror novella called The Body, which was adapted into the movie Stand By Me and can be found in the book Different Seasons.
Both can be found at Audible, and if you don't already have an account, you can sign up for a trial and get a free book at http://www.audibletrial.com/rational
Thanks for listening!
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
[deleted]
u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (2 days later)
Hey, hey, let's get the facts straight.
It was a train :P
u/everhow [+2] (a day later)
Nice episode! I think this is an especially tricky point for rational fiction, but not only for the reasons discussed here.
It's obviously true that kids can be unusually mature and intelligent for their ages, as well as having more experience than usual. And of course you can take some liberties with speech patterns and the like (we do that when writing adults after all).
But rational characters need not only be good at memorizing stuff and computing Bayes factors. They also need to be able to plan their actions well, respond to complexity and act calmly under pressure. This is an area where experience or unusual iq can't really compensate fully. Children have undeveloped brains, and it's especially the prefrontal lobes, and thus capacity for executive functioning and emotional inhibition, that is impaired. This makes them bad choices for MCs generally, and I think especially in rational fiction.
(Not that I think it's always a problem though. In hpmor the mc is such an alien that age doesn't even seem to apply. And in pokemon I kind of forget their ages altogether which helps with suspension of disbelief. But I think this is something many miss when writing children. Possibly because we don't normally see even mature children act under the kinds of pressure there are in most stories? While they can seem mature in basic social situations, this could maybe blind us a bit to their neuropsychological impairments?)
u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (a day later)
They also need to be able to plan their actions well, respond to complexity and act calmly under pressure.
To be fair, I think this is less of an age thing and more of a life experience thing again. I think kids who are used to high intensity situations acclimate to them fairly quickly: I know their neurobiology makes them more likely to act on emotion, but I don't know how much of that is a base-state thing.
u/everhow [+1] (2 days later)
Maybe? I guess that's an empirical question. But of course there can always be exceptions, and I know for a fact that motivation can improve executive functioning a lot (momentarily).
But still. Isn't impulsiveness and a general lack of control hallmarks of childish behavior? Children get easily into new things, laugh, cry and hurt each other without thinking, but are also quick to forgive, and generally do not plan much for the long term.
This is not rational behavior and will thus be deempathized in rational fiction. But because we feel this to be central to what is means to be a child, I think depicting children without these qualities makes them harder to recognize as children. (Never mind that there might be some real world counterexamples.)
u/DaystarEld [+1] Pokémon Professor (2 days later)
I do agree that these are hallmarks of childish behavior, but I think the mechanism is "newness" rather than something more fundamental to their neurology.
Like, a kid is more likely to laugh, cry, and hurt others impulsively in a variety of situations compared to an adult.
But if you put a kid in an environment in which they cry very often to the same thing, most will quickly acclimate and approach levels more similar to adults in terms of impulsive crying about that thing.
Part of that may generalize to the other impulsive/emotional reactions, but maybe not. In any case, what I don't think you'll see is a reset to a base state where they just continually are prone to crying often about that thing: they could still be "childish" in the way they react to things that bring them joy or make them angry, but be more mature in specific ways that make sense for their environment/upbringing.