I’ve been reading some fics with lil kids in them recently, and it’s been a bit hit-and-miss, and dialogue especially can get a bit jarring. Writing kids’ dialogue/action is REALLY hard, and sometimes a little nudge can help. 🙂
How to help, though? I decided to take some notes and make a little reference sheet for folks out there who don’t often get to interact with small persons, but like to write kidfic!
So, for reference – my child is 2 years and 10 months old – very bright, happy, funny, loud and super-active. Loves books, singing, words, the alphabet, numbers, dinosaurs, music, ballerinas, and puzzles. She can count to thirty, and will point out the beginning letter of any word a million times (”DOUBYOU IS FOR WHALE! Is for Whale, Mummy!”).
Speaks in third person sometimes, ‘MUMMY, OH! OH! [HER NAME] FELL OVER! OW! [HER NAME] HURT MY KNEE!” (and yes, she will mix up ‘my’ and ‘her’ because fuck third person/first person rules when you are two and cute as a button and just banged your knee.)
Has never used ‘Me loves’ or ‘Me wants’. EVER. I have never, ever, EVER heard a real living child use this ‘me’ instead of ‘I’ thing, and it’s ubiquitous in fic. It’s inescapable! Seriously. They get the difference between ‘me’ and ‘I’ REALLY FAST. If anything, they mix up ‘I’ and ‘I’m’ more often.
Mixes up who she’s speaking to – a LOT. I have been called everything from ‘Daddy’ to the cat’s name to the name of her daycare provider’s husband.
“Vegables” (I will be sad when this one disappears!)
When she got the hang of ‘-s’ to mean a plural, she started saying ‘sick’ instead of ‘six’. One, two, three, four, five, sick, seven. Because an ‘-s’ sound on the end meant that there was more than one six, yeah? Perfectly logical!
“I done” (I did), “I taked” (I took), “I putted” (I put). Past tense is difficult.
And mixing up which tense in a full sentence, yup, it happens. “Mummy! I want going for a WALK!” “Mummy, I’m swinged on a swing!”
“Lellow” instead of ‘Yellow’. She knows it begins with ‘Y’ – she just says ‘Lellow!’ Probably because it is more fun to say.
When she was learning to count to twenty, she would count EVERYTHING. And also make up the names of new numbers when she couldn’t think of them. So. Much. Counting.
Related – SO. MUCH. ALPHABET. ‘Lion is an L! Doubyou is for WATERMELON!’
“Wiv” actually happens. Who knew?
I spin like a ballelina! Look mummy! I’m a beeyootiful Ballellina!
for that matter, longer words like ‘beautiful’ don’t get shortened. They get ELONGATED. She sounds out every vowel and dipthong, quite stretched out. “Ohhh. Is so beeyootiful.” Hearing the word ‘hippopotamus’ is a lengthy experience.
‘No’ is a favourite word. It follows words, it precedes words, it is a complete sentence in itself. Always always always. No fic I have ever read ever shows the epic, EPIC overuse of NO in a toddler’s lexicon. Also, “I don’t WANT to/it” vs “I want it!!”
Repetition, endless ENDLESS repetition. Toddlers love repeating the last thing you say, too. So watch that language 😉
The ‘fwee’ instead of ‘three’ thing isn’t every kid, jeez. She can say ‘three’ perfectly well, and has been able to for at least a year. She can say GARDENING and HEXAGON and RHINOCEROS and DINOSAUR, ferchrissakes.
Likewise, a lisp and the ‘fw’ thing are not interchangeable to show ‘toddler speak’. A kid might have one of these, but it’s insanely unlikely to have BOTH.
Mixing up sentence order happens quite a lot! “It’s dinner time! Mummy, the clock is on sick! Is dinner time!” (The hand of the clock is on six – time for dinner!)
Context will often be completely ?????. She had quite a tantrum the other night because Daddy was going to give her three ‘stories’ after bath. We were confused – she LOVES reading, and always gets three books after bath, before bed. She absolutely adores it. But no, she didn’t want three STORIES – she wanted three books. To us, that was the same thing, but to her she wasn’t equating ‘story’ with ‘storybook’.
Likewise, when I asked her to point to something she wanted, she pointed her foot and said ‘point!’ I had meant to point her finger… but she didn’t know that it was CALLED ‘pointing’ her finger… she only knew ‘point’ in the context of pointing her foot!
Oh yes, vocalising/narrating everything she does. “I’m patting the pussycat!” “I’m bouncing on the bed!” “I’m riding the scootah!” (she totally says SCOOTAH) “I’m eating the peeeeeeeas!” “I’m playing the tea party!” “I’m in the bath!” “I’m on the toylut!” All. The. Time.
Incomprehensible mumbles between intelligble words every now and then. Her mouth can’t keep up, you see 🙂 So you end up with ‘MUMMY, (mumbleumble) a biscuit!’ You get the general gist, but the interim of the sentence is totally lost.
‘Is’ begins a lot of declarations, rather than ‘It Is.” So, “Is a butterfly!” “Is a pajamas!” “Is a dragonfruit!” “Is a tea party!”
Gets finicky about food, even food she usually LOVES. They love to test things at this age! Also, bedtime manipulation tactics, to delay lights-off. Sneaky af. Her current one is to yell ‘help help!!’ the minute we turn off the light and shut her bedroom door – god knows what the neighbours think!!
Alternatively clingy as hell/independent as hell. One day you might love to have a cuddle, but she won’t even look up at you. Ah well! The next day, you can’t pry her off you. HUH. One day, “I CAN DO [HER NAME] SHOES UP MYSELF!” and the next: “Mummyyyyyyyy, I want to putting on my dressing down” (she means dressing gown – and I have to do it for her – and I gotta put mine on too, or we don’t match and she will get the grizzles)
THE SULKS. Even the most chill, even-tempered toddler will get the sulks sometimes. Perhaps after being told, ‘you shouldn’t play with [dangerous thing] because you might hurt yourself’ for instance. That’s ok and normal – some feelings are very big for a very small person to manage! Tantrums happen too: don’t shy away from making your cute little kid a REAL cute little kid, with all the socially-inappropriate little-kid reactions, whining, sulking and screaming in public and all. It makes the cuddly little toddler-hugs even more special.
Demanding things, sometimes very rudely or imperiously, because manners are difficult to remember. They will NOT always say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ – you gotta prompt them to say it. (When they DO say it without prompting? *ANGELIC CHOIR*)
Ending a sentence before it is finished. For example, “Mummy, I put my gumboots!” The word ‘on’ SHOULD be at the end, of course, but the important word to her is GUMBOOTS, because they are new and she loves them. So. Much. So the sentence ends there!
Oh yes, there’s always the mispronounced word that, no matter how many times you gently correct it, no matter how many times she repeats it properly, stubbornly remains mispronounced. Ours are currently ‘dressing down’, ‘vegebles’ ‘ballellina’ and ‘airloplane.’ AND SIX. oh my god, lmao I love that one.
So, there we have it, a little assortment of things a real toddler says, complete with syntax and context. Use them wisely, and have fun writing those kid characters.
(any other parents/guardians/teachers/carers out there, feel free to add!)
I stop too. A lot. I stopped for nearly five months after the Dwarfling was born. I’ve stopped for a little while now, bc things are… a bit difficult rn, and my brain is somewhat disorganised and I’m currently running low on spoons.
My advice tends to be crud, but here you are, Nonnie:
1. Have a firm idea of what you want to achieve in the story, and write towards it. It is the ultimate goal, but there must be twists and turns and delays upon that road. Don’t rush. Change takes time. It’s tempting to resolve everything as quickly as you can – but it’s more engaging to see the journey.
2. Throw setbacks at your characters. LOTS of them. Make them struggle, make them doubt and strive and grow and fail – that’s how we can see what they are made of.
3. Ask a million questions. A MILLION. That setback – how did your character react to that? How did everyone else react to it? What does this setback mean for the plot now? What will it mean for your character long-term?
4. Give your characters opinions. Make those opinions clash with the opinions of others. Oh look, now you have a subplot! Which must also come to a resolution, and must also test your characters. Huzzah!
5. Oh yeah – subplots proliferate when you’re not looking. They breed like bunnies. Prune them back to three or four strong ones at a time, or you’re going to confuse your reader a bit, jumping tracks like that.
6. If your main difficulty is the actual LONG part of longfic, then believe me, I know. It’s hard. The trick I have is to simply pick it back up again. Doesn’t matter how long it’s been sitting there untouched. Just pick it back up again, at some point, when you are able to work on it. It’s not abandoned – it’s INDEFINITELY ON HOLD.
7. Build the tension over time to a climax, then release it with whatever – failure, success, happiness… but whatever has been achieved in that climax must now inform the NEXT order of events… and so the tension gets to build again. Never let it slacken entirely, or you risk One Million Endings Syndrome.
8. Pace pace pace pace pace. Keep it moving forward all the time, as inexorably and steadily as you can. Any departures from the pace will be very noticeable to your readers (you can use this for effect at some places, but use it sparingly or it becomes jerky and uneven). Don’t dwell forever in a moment or it becomes stale, but! don’t jackrabbit through it either. You’re the tortoise, not the hare. You can win the race in the end.
As always, my advice should be taken with a huge dollop of salt on top, because I suck at advice, Nonnie. I will try my best. Here we go.
Read your own earlier work. Don’t edit. Just read it.
That’s what I do, every so often, and it DOES help me to keep on chugging.
I go right, RIGHT back – sometimes from the beginning, sometimes from one of the earlier chapters in which no ‘big important’ event happens (like ch9, or 13 or something). On occasion it sparks more ideas for where I’m going next. It definitely helps me find more consistent character journeys by tracing them all the way from the beginning.
And it never fails to bring back the feeling of what it was like, back at the start, when I was full of tumbling ideas and words, all fighting for a chance to get out and onto the page. That’s a good feeling, and not a bad one to recapture.
author’s note on fanfic ch4: i’ll probably have it updated by the end of this week!
author’s note on fanfic ch5: so i know it’s been two years but i can explain
The AO3 Tag of the Day is: Which is why if we have nothing nice to say about a fic, we say nothing at all, and if we have nice things to say, we bury the author in our praise
There’s a lot of writing blogs out there with good ideas for starting! All I have is this: if there’s one particular scene you really want to write, but you have to slog through a whole bunch of connecting scenes/chapters to get to it? WRITE THE ONE YOU WANT TO WRITE FIRST. The TARGET scene.
It usually gives me ideas on how to approach it, ways in which to complicate that approach, etc. By the time I’ve filled in the intermediate steps, I have an even better idea of how that original target scene could go, and even more meaty stuff to pack into it.
That’s all I got, Nonnie. Sorry I am a bit useless at this!
So apparently round umpty-zillion of “people are killing fandom by not commenting” is going around, and I’ve seen a few posts trashing people for lurking/viewing/reading instead of actively participating.
My journal and my fic has always been a lurker-friendly zone. I think lurkers are great and people can fight me on this. Here’s why:
We all started out as lurkers. Or at least most of us did. Come on. I’m sure some people out there must’ve jumped into fandom with both feet and started writing and commenting right away, and good for you if you did! But I sure didn’t. I lurked for YEARS. And even now, though I’ve been in fandom since before Y2K, whenever I get into a new fandom or a new social media platform, I still lurk. I hang out around the fringes for awhile to get a feeling for the place before starting to participate. Back in the mailing list/bulletin board days, it was usually recommended that people do that on purpose, watch and listen and learn the local lingo and social rules before diving in. So you know what? You are not doing anything wrong and you are not doing anything that most of the people you see out there commenting and creating and reccing things haven’t done themselves.
We all have lurker days, weeks, months …. Nobody is 100% “on” all the time. Participating in fandom (commenting, reccing, creating content, and so forth) is WORK. It may be fun work, but it still takes effort! Even if you’re sometimes very active in fandom, then you’ll have life fall on your head or the brain weasels flare up, and you won’t have the time and energy to give. Don’t feel guilty about not being able to give fandom your extra spoons. No one in fandom has a right to demand a single spoon from you that you don’t want to give.
Some of today’s lurkers may be your friends tomorrow. How do I know this? Because I’ve made friends with some of them myself! I’ve had people delurk in my comments to say hi after YEARS of reading my fanfic without saying a word. Which I am totally okay with, by the way. And some of these people are good friends today.
So, in conclusion:
It is okay to feel too shy to come out of lurkerhood in fandom until you feel more comfortable there. It is fine, in fact, if you never do.
It is okay to be too busy and have too few spoons to comment or create stuff. You still have a perfect right to be in fandom and read and reblog whatever you want.
It is okay if you meant to comment on that fic or go back and press the kudos button but never got around to it.
It is okay if you have too many accounts already and don’t want to create a new one just to comment/participate on a social media platform.
It is okay if your personal situation (a stalker ex, controlling parents) makes it unsafe for you to create an account or comment on things.
It is okay if you can’t or don’t want to comment or do any of the other things that constitute non-lurkerhood, and you don’t owe anyone an explanation for why.
IT IS OKAY TO BE A LURKER.
yeah, i never thought about it, but it’s not good to make someone who’s shy or depressed or uncomfortable to feel like a parasite. fandom content is made to entertain, so if you’re showing up and enjoying stuff, that’s great.
Let’s frame it this way:
Creator manufactures product. This requires their personal touch, experience, skill set, and any training, all of which have taken the entirety of their lives to cultivate. This also requires the time it takes to produce the work, from concept to finished product. This also requires resources, which was probably a monetary investment into digital software or physical tools that must be replaced as used. It requires a workspace. It also includes labor, the physical act of doing these things, which depletes the mental and physical energy of the creator/laborer.
Creator offers product to public in exchange for compensation. This requires modifying their marketing technique to suit the platform(s)/stores it’s offered on/in. This requires modifying/formatting the product so that it is suitable for the platform(s)/stores. Creator must also generate advertising and archival information for the work so that it may be found by their audience. Creator must also select a platform suitable for transferring the product in exchange for the requested compensation.
Creator, once the product is out there, would like to work on more products. They like the idea of making the products and putting them into the world for consumer happiness, but they also need compensation because that is how they pay for the cost of the product: the labor, the resources, the manufacturing process, all that marketing—everything. They just need to get in touch with the consumer(s) to know what improvements could be made, or if their product was worth using resources, time, and skilled labor on in the first place. Compensation talks. If no one is buying, then that’s a surefire sign that no one wants your product and that you should stop selling it.
Now, you’d think that if a creator offers their product on a platform that allows them to ask for feedback (reviews/comments, shares, likes/kudos, etc.), that the exchange would be as follows: consumer consumes art in return for at least one or more forms of feedback, which can take anywhere from 1 second (kudos, like) to several minutes (comment) to make.
Creators aren’t mad because people are sampling their product, peeking in their storefront window, and just not digging it. They aren’t mad that someone got a sample of that awesome treat today, and vowed to come back the next day to make a full purchase. They’re not mad at the people who aren’t able to come in because of social anxiety, or because someone who hurts them is watching. They’re not mad at a bad day—they get bad days too, and know what it’s like to be in the red for spoons (as well as time, resources, labor, and actual money spent on providing resources/work space).
Creators are mad that people are coming into their store, unwrapping all the candy, eating it, and then leaving without so much as a wave hello or goodbye. They won’t even tell their friends where the store is. Creators are mad that customers are demanding more products without paying for the first one. They are mad that customers aren’t caring about store policy.
This would never fly with a commercial product. But yet it’s societally okay to do with art, particularly in fandom. Why is that? Because we don’t actually believe that art is work, or that artists have time and skills that are valuable.
Creators and consumers are just not speaking the same language. So maybe the above helps to illustrate why we’re so damn pissed and why we’re closing all our shops.
Hmm. Yes. I don’t think that lurking necessarily entails entitlement, though.
Oh god. I sat down to write an answer to this and wrote … a lot.
First of all, I’m a fanfic writer, artist, and vidder. I LOVE getting feedback on my work. I roll around in comments and nice tags like a cat in a field of catnip, believe me. People who leave feedback on my fic are awesome. <33333 So bear in mind as you read the following that I’m coming at this from a creator’s perspective. And, as a creative person, I agree that not putting enough value on creative work is a problem, societally speaking.
However.
The first problem I have with the above metaphor is that there are no physical goods involved here! There is an infinite amount of candy. There are no candy wrappers. Nothing is taken and no trash is left behind when someone reads a fic. An infinite number of people can still read the fic. No one else’s ability to read the fic is impaired.
But here’s the other, much bigger problem, and it’s what the rest of this tl;dr post is devoted to unpacking: blaming your customers for your lack of success will not make you a successful businessperson.
As well as writing fanfic, I’m also – as of the last couple of years – a pro writer; it’s what I do for a living now. Fanfic isn’t entirely like pro writing, but it does have some things in common with it, so since we’re talking about fanfic as a commodity, let’s run with that metaphor. Fanfic is “paid for” in comments and kudos; my pro novels are paid for with … well … money. So let’s say my books aren’t selling (i.e. your fic isn’t getting comments). There are many reasons why this could be! Now, it’s possible that my books aren’t very good. But let’s assume that’s not true. Let’s say that my books are excellent but they just aren’t being purchased. Why not? Here are some possibilities (and believe me, as a self-published author who makes a living off my work, I think about these things ALL THE TIME):
I’m marketing them poorly or inaccurately. Maybe my blurbs sound dull so people don’t go ahead and click to read the sample (which they will love, I just know it!). Maybe my romance books have covers and titles that make them look like suspense novels. Maybe I have them in the wrong categories. I need to look at other, more popular books similar to mine, and see what their authors are doing to advertise their books to readers, which is obviously working better than what I’m doing.
My books just aren’t very commercial. I’m writing lovely books that make my heart sing, but they’re not the genres and tropes that are selling well right now. In fanfic terms, this would be writing for the little fandom of your heart or the rarepair rather than the juggernaut pairing, or you just love writing sad love stories more than happy love stories. I can either train myself to write the popular genres and tropes, or I can resign myself to being less popular in return for the pleasure I get from writing books that satisfy me. (Both are equally valid solutions.)
You know what’s not going to help me sell more books? Blaming and shaming my readers for not buying them. They have a limited amount of money. They’re going to spend it on the books that look shiniest to them. A lot of people will NEVER buy my books, or anyone’s books, because they just don’t have the money. The rest must be enticed to do so. Yelling at these readers will not magically give them more money or miraculously endow them with a fondness for paranormal romance novels when they only read mysteries.
You can’t turn lurkers into commenters by trying to extort comments from them with guilt trips and threats to take your fic away, any more than you can turn non-buyers into book buyers by trying to guilt and shame them into buying your books. Fandom, take it from someone who markets her books for a living: that is a terrible marketing strategy.
Just as pro writers are trying to entice readers who have money into buying our books, you are trying to entice commenters into commenting on your fic. A lot of people will never comment for all the reasons in my above post. You cannot MAKE them comment. Instead, you have to get people who DO comment (who range from the people who comment on almost everything, to the people who can be enticed to comment once in a blue moon by a fic they simply ADORE) to spend their limited amount of commenting/reccing/kudosing time and energy on your fic by giving them a product they just can’t resist.
I could devote a whole ‘nother post to how to apply profic marketing strategies to making your fic more successful, should you want to. It’s not very fair, but it’s as true in fanfic as it is in publishing: the way you get more commenters is by expanding your audience (if only 1% of people comment, 1% of 10,000 people is a lot more than 1% of 100 people) and you do this by writing more popular fic. This means: writing popular tropes, writing popular fandoms, writing popular pairings. If you’d rather write the little pairing of your heart or break up every couple at the end of the fic because it feels right, that’s FINE! But it means that a mediocre 500-word curtainfic about the juggernaut big fandom pairing is going to get WAY more comments than your heartfelt 100K small fandom deathfic. Don’t blame your readers when you made that choice.
(I should mention that usually with fanfic, I just write the fics of my heart, whereas in profic I’m going for the crass commerciality. I really, truly love gen h/c, so I write a lot of it. I do not like writing erotica, so I rarely write it. If you like darkfic, you’ve got a tougher row to hoe than someone who writes curtainfic, because the audience is comparatively small, so you might have to work a little harder to find your niche. I realize this is unfair, but there’s not much you can do about it. If your readers want PWP instead of gen, you can either learn to write PWP, or write the best gen you can possibly write and cherish the comments you do get. Your readers are not withholding comments on your gen because they’re mean or lazy, I swear. It’s just that the audience for gen is more limited than the audience for, say, sexy slash.)
There’s also a huge element of chance to all of this. There is an awesome post by Penknife on LJ that calls this random element THE CLAW (from the movie Toy Story). I suggest reading the whole post because it’s excellent, but here’s Penknife’s basic description of the Claw concept as applied to fanfic:
See all the competently-written, nicely-formatted stories that a reasonable number of people have read, waiting in the big vending machine with all the other stories, looking hopefully upwards, waiting for the claw to descend and choose them? (It’s possible that this metaphor works less well if you’ve never seen Toy Story, but bear with me.) Every now and then the claw scoops up one of them, and it is this week’s Story that Ate Fandom, and it will be on twenty-six recs lists and get several hundred comments in a week.
And whether that is your story or not, you will never know why. The ways of the Claw are mysterious. The Claw usually picks good stories, but it doesn’t always pick the best story in any literary sense. It picks the story that is exactly what people want to read right now. Maybe it is a story that has actually never been done before in your fandom. Maybe it is a story that makes everyone who reads it feel good and leaves them in a warm fuzzy place full of love for your story and the world. Maybe it is about penguins, and right now what everyone really wants is penguins.
This happens in profic publishing all the time, by the way. Everyone wants to be grabbed by THE CLAW, and you can spend thousands of dollars on seminars and books to teach you how to get THE CLAW to grab your books, but what it comes right down to is, it will or it won’t. You cannot make THE CLAW grab your book, or your fic. However, you can make it more likely by honing your skills and, to be blunt, writing an absolute shit ton of fic.
I have actually had THE CLAW grab one of my fics. This happened to me in MCU fandom with the very first Captain America fic I ever wrote. It’s not my best fic, not my favorite fic, possibly not even a very good fic. However, I walked out of the theater after seeing Winter Soldier desperately wanting Steve/Bucky reunion fic. So I slammed one out and posted it. It turned out to be one of the first ones, in a pairing that turned into a juggernaut overnight, and the kudos on that fic went off the charts. It’s still my most-kudosed fic by far.
But before that, I wrote literally MILLIONS OF WORDS of fanfic in dozens of fandoms over the course of 15 years. I worked my ass off writing fanfic. Some of my fic was pretty popular. Some of it got zero comments, not even one. I wrote in popular fandoms. I wrote in fandoms so small I had to create the fandom tag on AO3. I wrote long WIPs and worked hard to update on time. I asked for prompts and wrote ficlets for people. I participated in fic exchanges. I ran exchanges. Basically I have spent 15+ years fandoming my little heart out.
And I could not have ever had THE CLAW grab that fic if I hadn’t written those millions of words, sometimes for very little reward other than the sheer pleasure of writing, because a) all that practice is how I got to the point where I could walk out of the theater, sit down, slam out 5K of competently feelsy fic, pick an attention-grabbing title, and (by total accident) put up a fic just in time for the movie-going masses to come looking for it, and b) the more fic you throw out there into the world, the more likely it’ll be that you actually will manage to hit pay dirt.
And I still got lucky, I know. There is also a negative version of THE CLAW. You are not guaranteed success, in fandom or in profic writing. You can do literally everything “right.” You can write the popular fandoms and pairings and tropes. You can type until your fingers hurt. You can put up fic after fic on AO3 and become a damn good writer and still never achieve even modest success.
This is not fair. I hate seeing friends fail to achieve the success I know they deserve. But inexplicable lack of success happens to just as many people as inexplicable success does.
Guys, fanfic and profic will both break your heart sometimes. There is no question about it; they just will. You’ll pour your heart and soul into a story only to watch it sink like a stone. You’ll write the best damn fic you can write and then watch someone else’s fic, that does ALL THE SAME THINGS, get recced everywhere while people ignore yours. You’ll read a fic that is absolutely perfect, that makes your heart sing, and the only comment on it will be yours. There is no “if” about this, only “when.”
This is not your readers’ fault. This is not your fault. And blaming your readers for being inadequately appreciative will not make you more successful.
Aw Yiss 