Writing amazing, authentic middle-grade characters can take a lot of observation and note taking. If you have real kids in your life to model characters after, that could give you a head start, but whether you do or not, these tips can help you figure out what observations to make and even help you expand your stories to other characters, other ages, and show the real range and diversity that exists amongst kids.
This article focuses on middle-grade characters, but you can generalize many of these tips to younger kids and teens.
This is just Part One for now, but there should be plenty to chew on here for a while. Check back later as I add more tips to help you write authentic middle-grade characters. After you try out the exercises, let me know how they worked out for your story or novel.
Introduction: Kids are not miniature adults
The very first and most important thing to remember is that a child character is not a miniature version of an adult. Often writers think it’s just a simple matter of dumbing down vocabulary in the dialogue to indicate a character young. Other times, writers struggle to get the age just right and end up creating characters that seem a bit off, because they are acting inappropriately for their age. But, what’s considered appropriate? And finally, writers might have their child character worry about things that seem overly shallow or overly complex for their age and development. But how do you figure out the right balance?
Solution #1: Find common ground
Now that you know that kids are not like adults, you can start to think critically about what sets kids apart? Start by making a list of the things that kids worry about in their day-to-day life and adjust it for your young character. Kids may not have to worry about jobs or paying the bills, but certainly they have to think about the daily schedule surrounding school and after school activities. They have deadlines and stress just like adults. They have to find creative ways to save up their allowance or birthday money to buy special things they want for themselves. They are accountable to parents and teachers the way you might be accountable to a boss. They have best friends, stressful relatives, first loves, and loyal pets just like adults do. So, while you may not be able to scale down adult troubles, you can certainly find things that resonate with both adult and child characters and use those things to build a bridge to your character. This will help you lay the emotional foundation of your character.
Exercise: Come up with a list of things your middle grade character faces in an average week. Make sure to write down notes about their routine non-school activities from sports to church to music lessons. Then add in their non-routine activities like birthday parties, weekends at the mall, etc.
Here are some other prompts:
Which friends do they see outside of school? How about rivals?
Which relatives stress them out?
Who does your character confide in the most?
Do they use social media, chat rooms in games, cell phones, or other ways to connect to people?
Which activities cause them stress and which relax them?
Look at the list again and imagine the stress or tension surrounding each scenario. Even things that bring joy can add a level of tension to a person’s life. For example, a middle-grader might love dance, and use it to relax after a week of homework, but they might also spend hours agonizing over a single tricky maneuver that they can’t seem to master. This one activity can bring joy or stress or even both simultaneously.
Solution #2: Think through how your child character would handle conflicts
Now that you have the basics of your child character’s daily life, think about how children handle stress differently than adults do.
Exercise: Go back to your list of prompts and pick a few to expand on. After each short answer, add a short sentence or list of your character’s coping strategies in that situation.
Example:
Who does the child run to when things get rough?
Maybe you answer that your middle-grader, Kate, talks to her best friend, Madison, about her troubles. Madison always talks her down so she can get out there the next day and face the world. Maybe you invent a scenario in which Kate had an embarrassing moment at theatre camp that afternoon and now she’s afraid to go back to camp ever again. She prefers to talk on the phone, but texting Madison at eleven o’clock at night isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
Solution #3: Add an obstacle or escalate the conflict to see what you character will do
Now that you know how your character responds to stress in everyday life, it’s time to start upping the stakes for the character. It’s never enough for middle-grade characters to face easy-to-resolve problems. That works occasionally in sitcoms because the story has to be distilled down to something easy to fit into a few minutes, but in writing this will feel shallow or mundane. That doesn’t mean the character isn’t facing real problems, of course, but if the solution is too convenient, quick, or obvious, it will feel that way. But you can add texture and depth to your character’s situation by forcing them to reach further and further for that solution. Maybe the problem was straight forward, but that doesn’t mean the answer needs to be.
Exercise:
Look at your example and think about what types of things could derail the conflict resolution. In other words, create a new conflict or obstacle that would further thwart your character. What does your character do now that the stakes are higher than they started? How do they react? What are they feeling now?
Example:
Okay, so Kate goes to text her best friend about something bad that happened. Except, when she picks up her phone, she sees a text meant for Ann that Madison sent to her. Right there in the middle is a photo of Kate embarrassing herself spectacularly in front of the entire theatre camp. Madison was trying to send the message to Ann, but Kate ended up tagged in the message by mistake. Oops. Now Kate is upset, and not only can she not talk to her best friend, Kate, but now she thinks that the whole middle school knows about the embarrassing incident, so it has spread beyond the original boundaries of just her theatre friends.
How does she react now that her usual channels have been blocked and now that she feels betrayed, too?
What makes this different than an adult character? The answer depends on who your character is, but in general, your middle-grade character will react with more impulse and be a bit more rash than your adult character. Your middle grader will feel the emotions in a way that’s more pure—less tempered by life experience or wisdom or perspective. They might show a bit more of this emotion outwardly—or they might try harder to cover it up than their adult self would. Which brings us to the next solution.
Solution #4: Let your character be less than perfect
You can start to shape your child character now that you know quite a lot about them already. Kids can’t handle stress or emotions the same way as adults because they don’t have as much life experience yet. That’s not to say adults are always great at this either. And I’m not saying that some kids aren’t better at stress management than the adults in their lives. I’m just saying that it’s all relative. Every time your character goes through something profound, they will learn from it and maybe use that experience when they encounter something later on. You can build this into your young character’s story arc. You can make it part of your child character’s journey. And you can show them trip and stumble along the way as they try navigating their problems (and sometimes failing spectacularly). Don’t be afraid to show your character making mistakes, because real-life kids make mistakes all the time.
Solution #5: Channel your past experiences
On the subject of mistakes, think back to all the mistakes you made when you were a child. If you like to journal or if you want to expand on the exercises in this article, you can fill up a page on this and use it for writing prompts when you get stuck.
Exercise:
Write a list of difficult and emotionally-laden memories from when you were in middle grade. Or make up examples from real-life observations. You can use your own relative, old classmates, students (if you’re a teacher or mentor), or something observed in the wild. Here are some writing prompts to get you started.
Can you remember a time that you said something awkward about a friend or classmate?
Do you remember wearing the wrong thing to school or some event?
Have you ever messed up a friendship by doing or saying something really regrettable?
Have you ever overreacted to something that seemed huge at the time, but was manageable in retrospect?
Start building this list of failures. Or, if you were not at all awkward, then get creative here. Think about something you did really well and imagine your younger self doing something else. Would things have turned out differently?
Example:
Let’s get back to Madison and Kate for a moment. Kate is feeling pretty upset over having her embarrassment broadcast to the entire world. So, what if, instead of Kate telling her dad about it over a plate of nachos…we have Kate make a mistake? Kate decides to retaliate. In a big way. Maybe she decides to embarrass Madison in turn. Maybe she does something else. But whatever she does, the mistake takes the inter-character conflict to the next level…and since this is middle graders we’re talking about, the results will be—epic—because everything feels bigger at that age, right?
Now you are on the path to creating your middle grade character. You understand what makes them tick. You know how to challenge them. And you know how to escalate the conflict from something faced in the normal course of your character’s life to something that will change your character inside and out. Do you see a story idea or novel plot beginning to emerge? I promise, if you do the exercises here and keep shaping and building, your story will begin to evolve and pretty soon you’ll be writing your story or novel.
See Part Two for more solutions.
Happy writing.
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