Welcome!

Thank you for coming back for Part Three of my series: Solutions for Writing Middle-Grade Characters. In this post, I’ve added three more solutions, with this week’s focus being on verbal development. Unlike the dialogue-focused article, this week I shift direction more toward how children grow and change over time as they age. I also talk about how kids develop and progress in their own unique ways and how it can be reflected with fictional characters. In the coming weeks, I’ll be adding to this series of articles with posts that discuss physical development and other areas of child development.

As with the previous post, this article focuses on middle-grade characters, but you can generalize many of these tips to younger kids and teens.

To see Solutions #1 through 5, click here: Five Solutions for Writing Middle-Grade Characters: Part 1

To see Solutions #6 through 9, click here: Solutions for Writing Middle-Grade Characters: Part 2

This article adds to the previous Solutions by helping you come up with idea for creating precocious, talented, or gifted characters that still feel authentic to their chronological age. Like the previous articles in the series, this article focuses on middle-grade characters, but you can generalize many of these tips to younger kids and teens.

After you read the article, don’t forget to add a comment or question or leave comments on my Social Media posts. I’m always looking for feedback or ideas for future articles. Let me know how my hints, tips, or solutions have worked out for your story or novel.

Introduction: Verbal skills in children

Often writers want to create a character who is in middle grade based on chronological age, but who is sophisticated and articulate far beyond the expectations of their age. Kids come in a wide range of abilities, and plenty of kids are equipped with college-level vocabulary. So how do you write this into your story without the child sounding too much like an adult?

I think it helps to start by looking at the character’s personality first. Personality will affect how, when, and where a child will use those verbal gifts. Just because a child is capable of holding their own in a grownup conversation, doesn’t mean they will always do so.

This first solution looks at whether the child will speak up in a conversation or save the words for later.

Solution #10: Is the character comfortable in their element?

Extroverts or outgoing personalities

A child is more likely to speak their mind if they are in their comfort zone. If your child character is outgoing and gets along well with strangers then they might talk freely in every scene or setting.

You’ve probably seen those kids who can hold their own in a conversation regardless of who they’re speaking to. They are the natural extroverts or kids with advanced vocabulary, or maybe they are the kids who excel in acting classes. Maybe you’ve met those kids with the natural entrepreneurial gift who can walk up to a stranger and fearlessly present their business idea, invention, or handcrafted product and immediately turn a profit through the power of their fearless personality. They might be leaders, scientists, or radio talk show hosts someday. Some of them might already be leaders in their own community.

For these kids, it’s less about the level of vocabulary and more about their ability to harness what they know about language and channel their thoughts into speech. These kids don’t need to use jargon or big words to get their point across. They can be any age or grade and still communicate smoothly. These kids are often articulate from a young age even when they haven’t yet learned how to form words into paragraphs. That doesn’t stop them. They just keep expressing themselves until the vocabulary catches up later down the road.

When writing this type of character, you can support their dialogue by also writing strong body language. For these characters, think about how they make eye contact, how close they stand to their audience. Do they comfortably address groups of people? Is there a limit to the size of the group? Maybe it’s the school theatre, or their church. Maybe they don’t have a limit to the size of the crowd. You’ve seen kids perform fearlessly on television talent shows. Meanwhile other kids will be happier with a smaller venue like their classroom. Now, coming back to the idea of gestures: what types of gestures do these characters use to keep attention focused on them while they communicate? Do they smile a lot to keep their audience at ease or do they wear a serious expression that demonstrates the gravity of what they are saying?

Introverts, shy kids, or less-outgoing personalities

If your character is less extroverted, you can save the long-winded passages of dialogue for the scenes with close friends, family, or small groups. You character might speak very little when they are feeling overwhelmed by crowds or if they are in unfamiliar territory. Maybe the character likes to observe their surroundings before talking to the people around them. Or maybe the character is happy to talk to strangers, but they think before speaking and plan out their words carefully. Or perhaps, it’s not whether they know the people they are talking to. It could be that the character prefers one-on-one interaction over group interaction. In that case, your character might avoid talking in groups of other children, but be quite chatty when hanging out with just on person. This can be reflected in your story by showing your character in different social situations throughout the story.

Your character’s personality will matter a lot when it comes to writing these scenes, but you can harness your knowledge of the character to lengthen or shorten their dialogue and adjust the conversation topics to match whether the character is in a comfortable place.

Solution #11: Advanced vocabulary by age

Sometimes your precocious and well-read MG characters will use a highly-developed vocabulary…if it suits the character. As a general rule, children’s vocabularies will grow more vast as they get older, so older characters would use more complex vocabulary than younger characters. If you are writing a story with precocious kids of various different ages, (maybe a sibling group or class full of gifted students), this can be a way to distinguish their character voices in the dialogue while still showing the reader how advanced they are for their age. The vocabulary can be advanced for all of the kids, but relatively more advanced for the older kids. Relative, being the key here.

Solution #12: Vocabulary by interest

This seems pretty self explanatory on the surface, but there are a couple of things to consider here when adding this too the concept of child development. Absolutely you should customize the vocabulary to the character, as would happen if your adult character is highly knowledgeable in an area or specialty. Just as an adult would know the jargon surrounding their college major or career, kids will have a better grasp of concepts or vocabulary related to their topics of interest. This is especially important, though, for children, because they might not have the more general background knowledge yet that a high school or college graduate would have. Children can have a third grade vocabulary in every are except their favorite subject.

When writing this middle-grade character, your character will be really into a topic, hobby, or activity and know that subject inside or out. So if your character is a budding paleontologist, they might know obscure facts about every species of dinosaur ever discovered. When talking about this topic, they will be more articulate, comfortable, and verbose than when they are talking about a topic they are not familiar with or simply don’t enjoy. These kids tend to get along great with others who share their passions, but they might struggle with talking to kids who are not as excited about their interests.

Exercise: Try adding some conflict or tension to your story by taking two of your characters and give them very different interests. The more those interests conflict with each other, the better. Next, place them together in different types of settings and situations. Maybe they will find common ground in some scenes, and maybe they will annoy each other endlessly in other scenes. Have some fun with this as you go.

For example: Maybe Character A is really into violin music and has been playing non-stop since he was three. He writes his own compositions and he can’t stop talking about it. Character B knows nothing about music and prefers the comfort of a pencil and paper as she solves complex math equations. When it comes to everyday situations, they can’t seem to agree on anything. They try to avoid each other most of the time, but then their teacher assigns them to partner up for a class project, so they are stuck with each other. After much bickering they decide to do a presentation abut the mathematics of musical instruments. Eventually they end up designing a new string instrument that they present to the class.

Solution #13: Non-talkers and nonverbal communication

Some people just don’t use verbal communication as their main form of communication. So how do you deal with someone who uses words sparingly? Luckily there are a couple of ways to handle this well as a writer.

This is when non-verbal communication comes in handy. I’ll go into more detail about this in another article, but for now, just know that your character can communicate in many ways. You can use these instead of words or to support the dialogue depending on the character and the scene.

Body language

They can use body language such as shrugging, nodding, crossing their arms, and other easy to interpret cues.

Sounds

They can use the occasional grunt or other non-word sound to demonstrate to the other character that they are actively listening. For humans, the first form of communication is crying, laughing, or screaming. They move on to babbling and go through many stages of sound on the way to words and even more stages on the way to phrases, sentences, and eventually paragraphs. You child character might also use one of these stages of communication depending on who they are or where they are at in your story.

Example: Your character becomes ill. He is feeling too sick to speak because of a high fever and a sore throat, but he conveys his needs to his parents through sounds and some basic words or gestures followed by coughing or swallowing of phlegm.

Silence

A character can use silence. That’s right. Silence. Maybe character A is talking up a storm for a few paragraphs. Then they ask a question from Character B or get some sort of feedback and…nothing. White space on the page is as effective as long paragraphs for conveying communication style, and non-answers are a perfectly valid way to get an idea across in the story.

Example: “So then we went to the mall and I looked at all of the sunglasses and tried on about a hundred pairs, and…Sam, are you even listening to me?”

Mary looked at Sam to see if he was paying attention.

“Well, anyway, as I was saying, there was this one salesperson who kept coming over to see if I was ready to make my purchase…”

See what I did there? Sam doesn’t actually acknowledge Mary, but he’s still clearly in the scene. In fact, the lack of response stands out as notable. This would be even more pronounced if Mary’s dialogue went on for many lines on either side of the action beat. Then it would be a wall of text followed by a short action beat and then another wall of text. (I decided to spare you that in the article.)

Exercise: Play around with this to find ways to make this response fit different tones or emotional undercurrents depending on how your characters relate to each other in the story. Is your quiet character more terse, more stoic, more shy, or just distracted by other things? Is the chatty character used to having an attentive audience or are they less in tune with non-verbal cues from other people? Mix and match to see how it affects the scene in interesting ways.

Signing and gestures

In this article, I’m not referring to American Sign Language or the many other signing languages around the world. Those are official languages with complexities I am not qualified to discuss, and which are covered in-depth in other well-written articles by experts. For now, I’m referring only to informal signing of the type you might get in casual conversation. For example, visualize the type of gesture people make when at a restaurant when it’s time to ask for the bill. Or a gesture you’d use to signal your child to quiet when you are talking on the phone.

So how do you use this for middle-grade characters?

Here are some examples:

• A kid raises their hand in school to ask questions, so maybe your quiet character also does this to get attention when in a group of kids talking, because it’s not their style to verbally interrupt the conversation.
• Maybe the teacher has a classroom sign for using the bathroom.
• Maybe Kid A is about to spill a secret and Kid B uses the throat-slashing sign to indicate trouble if Kid A talks
• Maybe a pair of siblings or besties have developed their own private signs to communicate when the parents are around.
• A person signals the start of a prayer before a meal
• A group of kids use a secret handshake

A lot of these gestures are universal, while others are region-specific, cohort-specific, or even personal.

Example: Maybe your child character has a superstitious ritual that they perform at the beginning of every baseball game. The other characters are perplexed by this ritual, but you, as the reader, are privy to the meaning behind these gestures, and eventually the backstory behind these gestures become clear, and you realize there are other underlying messages and nuances that come out during the course of the novel.

Passing notes or texting

This might seem a bit obvious, since this article is written for writers, but some people are just better as written expression. You can have a character who only communicates using written words or pictures. This can be situation-dependent. Maybe the character is trying to avoid their parents being privy to the conversation, so they test their friend, who just happens to be sitting next to them. Maybe the character gets overwhelmed by anxiety in some situations and writing is a way to get a message out when they are rendered speechless.

Or maybe, this is a matter of setting. A character might be quiet at school, but then goes home and spends time on the computer catching up with friends using social media, texts, or other written means.

Summary

Hopefully, this article has given you a few ideas for how to use communication in different ways to make your different characters unique and interesting. If you have questions, ideas, or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment below or comment on my social media posts. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Happy writing.
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