On writing a believable child character

When a novelist sits down to place a child on the page, the task is deceptively simple. We have all been children. We have all known children. Surely the material is right there, stored in muscle and memory. Yet any writer who has lingered over a scene with a young character knows how quickly the illusion can collapse. The child begins to sound like a forty-year-old wearing a smaller suit. The dialogue rings false. The perceptions feel borrowed from adult nostalgia rather than lived experience. To bring a child convincingly into fiction requires more than affection. It demands a working knowledge of how young minds actually move through the world, how they parse language, how they interpret danger or delight, and how they inhabit a particular patch of ground.

This is a challenge that occupies writers across the English-speaking world, and Australian novelists have approached it with particular confidence. From Mem Fox's picture books read aloud in suburban Brisbane loungerooms to Morris Gleitzman's novels passed between classmates in Melbourne classrooms, the country's literature for young readers has long trusted that children can carry weighty stories. When an adult novelist steps outside the dedicated children's market and places a child within a wider work, the lessons of that local tradition still apply. A believable child character must sound, think, and feel like a child rather than a projection of the writer's longing or anxiety.

Listen before you write

Voice is the first casualty when a child character fails. Adult writers, surrounded by adult speech all day, often forget the strange, musical, sometimes hilariously literal way children use language. A child does not say, "I felt a profound sense of isolation." A child says, "Nobody would play with me and I sat on the step." The cadence is shorter. The vocabulary is concrete. The connections skip from one thing to another in ways that surprise the rationalising adult mind. To capture this, a writer must do something uncomfortable: stop narrating and start listening.

Australian childhoods are rich with particular textures that can sharpen a young voice. A child growing up in Perth might speak of the sea breeze coming off the Indian Ocean the way an adult speaks of the weather. A Sydney kid might describe a Saturday morning trip to the local markets in Manly or Paddington with a specificity no outsider could invent. The trick is not to pepper dialogue with slang for local colour's sake, but to let the rhythms of a place inform the way a character sees and reports. Reading the work of Australian children's authors helps. So does eavesdropping, in a gentle way, at school gates, on trams, at Bunnings on a Saturday morning when families line up for the community sausage sizzle. Real children, given a few minutes of attention, will hand you their exact vocabulary.

Honour the inner logic

Children are not irrational. They are differently rational. Their logic is built from limited experience but applied with ferocious consistency. A six-year-old who has been told that stealing is wrong may extend that rule to a sibling who took the last piece of lamington without asking, and may do so with a moral seriousness that puts adults to shame. Conversely, the same child may believe, with absolute conviction, that the moon follows them when they walk home from school. Fiction that respects this inner logic treats the magical and the moral as equally real to the child. It does not wink at the reader. It does not condescend.

This is where many adult novels stumble. The author remembers being a child and so inserts what the child thought about later, what the adult understands now. The result is a young character who sounds reflective in the way that only a middle-aged writer can be reflective. A believable child lives in the present tense of their own experience. When something hurts, it hurts completely. When something is funny, the laughter is sudden and physical. The job of the novelist is to enter that present tense and stay there, paragraph after paragraph, without the safety net of hindsight. Australian fiction has offered strong models here. John Marsden's young protagonists, facing extraordinary circumstances in rural Victoria, think with a clarity that belongs to their age even as the plot demands more. Writers who study such examples learn that respect, not realism, is the deeper requirement.

Mine memory without sentimentalising it

Every adult writer draws on the well of their own childhood. It is almost unavoidable. The danger is that the well has been filtered through decades of editing. We remember the significant moments and forget the texture. We remember how we felt about our grandfather's funeral, but not the long, boring Tuesday afternoons that filled most of our childhood. We remember the holidays at the coast, but not the homework we avoided. Fiction that relies only on curated memory produces children who are too knowing, too composed, too special.

The remedy is honest recollection combined with present observation. Sit with an old photograph album and try to remember what the room smelled like. Watch a child in a café in Adelaide and notice how they examine a dropped spoon as if it were a piece of archaeology. Read journals you kept at twelve, if you kept any, and wince at how ordinary and inarticulate your actual concerns were. The child you were is more useful, more interesting, and more credible than the child you have mythologised. Australian memoirists have long understood this. The best travel writing from the country, including Howard Franklin's own An Irish Experience, leans on the texture of remembered sensation rather than the polish of adult interpretation. The same principle applies when constructing a fictional young voice.

Avoid the two extremes

Two failures of characterisation await any novelist who writes children. The first is the miniaturised adult, precocious beyond belief, delivering the kind of lines that only a wise elder should deliver. The second is the comic pet, the winsome imp whose only function is to be cute. Both are forms of avoidance. They let the writer skip the difficult work of imagining an actual young mind.

A believable child sits between these poles. They can surprise us with insight one moment and baffle us with confusion the next. They can be cruel and kind within the same afternoon. They can worry intensely about something an adult would dismiss, and ignore entirely something an adult considers grave. Australian family novels, whether set in the wheat belt of Western Australia or the inner suburbs of Melbourne, often achieve this balance by allowing their young characters to be contradictory. The kid who torments their younger sibling in one chapter can sob over an injured bird in the next, and neither behaviour needs to be explained away. Both are true. Both belong to the same child.

Place the child in a real world

Finally, a believable child must inhabit a believable world. Specificity is the great gift a writer can give a young character. Mention the brand of breakfast cereal. Mention the way the light falls across the kitchen table at half past six in the morning during a Hobart winter. Mention the sound of cicadas in a Brisbane summer or the particular quality of silence on a rural property outside Canberra. These details do more than decorate. They root the character in a body, a household, a climate, a culture. They tell the reader, without argument, that this child exists.

This is especially important when a novel crosses borders. A child reader, or an adult reader revisiting their own youth, recognises a false setting instantly. Local bookshops from Readings in Carlton to Dymocks in the Sydney CBD know that their customers, including the young ones who arrive clutching parent-funded gift cards, want stories that take their world seriously. The Children's Book Council of Australia has long championed books that respect young readers as citizens of a particular place rather than generic small people. Adult novelists who include child characters would do well to honour the same standard. Give the child a postcode. Give them a backyard. Give them the kind of weather that only happens where they live.

Recommendations for writers working with young characters

• Read contemporary children's and young adult fiction by Australian authors, paying attention to voice as much as plot.
• Spend unhurried time with children of the age you are writing, whether at family gatherings, school visits, or local sporting fixtures on a Saturday morning.
• Keep a notebook of phrases and observations, capturing the exact wording a child uses rather than paraphrasing it into adult prose.
• Revisit your own childhood artefacts, from photographs to school reports, and resist the temptation to tidy what you find.
• Allow your young characters to be contradictory, boring, and surprising in roughly equal measure.
• Ground every scene in sensory detail that ties the character to a specific place, season, and household.

If this exploration of writing young voices has stirred something in your own memory, you are invited to share your reflections in the comments below. Howard G. Franklin's novels, including Gideon's Children, and his memoir An Irish Experience, offer further examples of how a writer's attention to character, place, and the inner life can carry a reader across decades and continents. Both titles are available through Australian booksellers, and excerpts, reviews, and additional essays on the craft of writing can be found elsewhere on this site.