Speaking of Speaking

One of the things that's hard for a kids' author is replicating the way kids talk to each other. Not so much the actual vocabulary level, grammar, speaking style, etc. of individual kids (though that's tricky too!), but the way they interact when more than two of them are having a conversation.

For once thing, kids haven't always learned the rules of conversational give-and-take yet. By the time we reach adulthood, we've figured out what our local culture feels is the "right" length of pause to indicate you're done speaking, the non-verbal sounds that indicate you're interested, what counts as a rude interruption versus "taking your turn". Kids are still working this out. You get a lot more interruptions, where one child was definitely not done talking and the other breaks in with something that may or may not be related. One of the friends of my favourite eight-year-old pretty consistently responds to this by repeating what he was saying, but louder. Another generally says something like "I wasn't done!" or "I was still talking!" Kids have preferred strategies to make sure they get to say what they wanted to.

Another thing about kids' conversations is that topic shifts can happen really fast. When an adult says an apparent non sequitur in conversation, often someone will ask them to back up and explain how this was linked to what was previously being discussed. Kids are more likely to just run with the new topic, if it interests them. So you get these almost dreamlike transcripts when you write them down, where there's clearly some logic connecting the statements but it's really not clear what it is.

(Conversely, you will also get a lot more monotonous "Bulbasaur is the best starter!" "Charmander is the best starter!" "Bulbasaur!" "Charmander!" arguments, where each participant just keeps repeating their statement without adding any new context. Most adults have worked out that this is not a successful arguing strategy, and will at least try to provide supporting reasons or say something other than pure repetition. Whereas kids will sometimes just... keep going. I once counted sixteen repetitions of the same three-word statement before it degenerated into shoving.)

All this is a challenge for writing dialogue. I wanted the way Caden and Hunter and Masami interact to be noticeably different from the way that e.g. Caden and Bookshelf talk to each other in the previous chapter, because a kid talking to a grownup is a very different thing from three kids talking together. Part of the difference too, of course, is that Bookshelf is imparting information, whereas Caden and his friends aren't talking with any particular aim in mind; but I as an author have certain things I want their conversation to get across, so I have to bury that information in the meandering, interrupting, chaotic stew of words that is their natural mode of interaction.

One of the all-time great authors is, of course, Terry Pratchett, whom it seems appropriate to mention now as we've just passed the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May and the lilacs are blooming outside my window. His "Johnny" trilogy is one of my all-time favourite children's series, and the way the kids in it talk to each other is a master-class in dialogue.