Writing Right with Dmitri: Youthful Characters
Created | Updated Mar 11, 2012
Words, words, words. That's what we're made of. Herewith some of my thoughts on what we're doing with them.
Writing Right with Dmitri: Youthful Characters
Writers were young once, although you can't tell by looking at most of them. Or by listening to them, either. A whole lot of us are sententious and prone to pontificating about adult concerns, and generally lacking in youthful exuberance. In short, we sound old.
One writer who never seems to have forgotten what it was like to be a kid was Mark Twain. Mind you, his view of childhood was a bit, how shall we say it, jaundiced. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Victorians who idealised little children and extolled the innocence and joyfulness of the blessed state of prepubescence, Twain seemed to think boys, in particular, were hellions bent on mischief. He probably spoke from experience. Mind you, Twain didn't think there was anything wrong with being mischievous. His idea of a boy hero was Tom Sawyer. Tom Sawyer is a kid I wouldn't want to have in class. Come to think of it, I wouldn't want to have Mark Twain in class. He'd just disrupt the lesson.
Early in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, we get the impression that Tom is probably going to grow up to be the head of a Marketing Department – as soon as one has been invented. Lazy Tom convinces his fellow youths in Hannibal, Missouri, that white-washing a fence is a much-desired privilege, rather than the chore Tom knows it to be. Rather like a crooked businessman from Srinagar, Tom adds insult to injury by persuading the other boys not only to white-wash Aunt Polly's fence, but to pay him for the privilege. Mr Twain obviously finds this sort of mendacity amusing, although it annoyed me as a ten-year-old.
In a further chapter, which takes place on a Sunday, Tom builds on his success by using the boodle he's made to buy up all the little tickets the other, more conventionally worthy, children have amassed by learning Bible verses. A child with enough tickets has supposedly learned 2000 Bible verses, and is entitled to a free Bible of his own from the Sunday School. Tom takes his ill-gotten tickets and turns them in. The Sunday School folks are amazed, and have questions.
"...you'll be a great man and a good man yourself, some day, Thomas, and then you'll look back and say, It's all owing to the precious Sunday-school privileges of my boyhood...And now you wouldn't mind telling me and this lady some of the things you've learned – no, I know you wouldn't – for we are proud of little boys that learn. Now, no doubt you know the names of all the twelve disciples. Won't you tell us the names of the first two that were appointed?"
Tom was tugging at a button-hole and looking sheepish. He blushed, now, and his eyes fell. Mr. Walters' heart sank within him. He said to himself, it is not possible that the boy can answer the simplest question – why DID the Judge ask him? Yet he felt obliged to speak up and say:
"Answer the gentleman, Thomas – don't be afraid."
Tom still hung fire.
"Now I know you'll tell me," said the lady. "The names of the first two disciples were – "
"DAVID AND GOLIATH!"
Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene. – Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
I never much liked Tom Sawyer. He's too much of a capitalist for me. I really liked Huck Finn, though. This may be me pulling for the underdog. Huck's an abused child, a semi-orphan, ethnically challenged (his name's Finn in an Anglo-Saxon world), he's got unfashionable red hair and freckles. He's poor. He has wonderfully undesirable traits, such as smoking and violating the Fugitive Slave Act. I admire this kid.
In a good cause, Huck is not even above cross-dressing.
"...And don't go about women in that old calico. You do a girl tolerable poor, but you might fool men, maybe. Bless you, child, when you set out to thread a needle don't hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at it; that's the way a woman most always does, but a man always does t'other way. And when you throw at a rat or anything, hitch yourself up a tiptoe and fetch your hand up over your head as awkward as you can, and miss your rat about six or seven foot. Throw stiff-armed from the shoulder, like there was a pivot there for it to turn on, like a girl; not from the wrist and elbow, with your arm out to one side, like a boy. And, mind you, when a girl tries to catch anything in her lap she throws her knees apart; she don't clap them together, the way you did when you catched the lump of lead. Why, I spotted you for a boy when you was threading the needle; and I contrived the other things just to make certain. Now trot along to your uncle, Sarah Mary Williams George Elexander Peters, and if you get into trouble you send word to Mrs. Judith Loftus, which is me, and I'll do what I can to get you out of it. Keep the river road all the way, and next time you tramp take shoes and socks with you. The river road's a rocky one, and your feet'll be in a condition when you get to Goshen, I reckon." – Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Which brings up a good point: if you're telling about kids, don't make the grownups into idiots. Make them wise, and clever, and funny. And let them talk straight to the kids. You get more mileage that way.
You think Mark Twain makes you like kids? Why, honey, he ain't a patch to that great writer about young folk, Ms Gene Stratton-Porter. This Hoosier naturalist was a pioneer in wildlife photography. Her Limberlost novels were a favourite of my youth, egged on by the fact that they made my sister cry happily. (She's the most sentimental physicist in captivity.) While exhibiting all the hackneyed plot devices of a Frances Hodgson Burnett – noble orphans, economic differences with a bit of Social Darwinism thrown in, lost inheritances that show up on schedule, etc – Stratton-Porter manages to make you fall in love with her characters, who are open-hearted and far ahead of their time.
She's not racist, for one thing. For another, she's a true feminist. Her female characters are as likely to rescue the male characters as the other way around. An example is the hero of Freckles, who is a bit older than Tom and Huck, being about 18 or so when the story starts. In a key scene, Freckles is tied to a tree by tree rustlers who plan to murder him. When the cavalry get there, they find the female wildlife photographer (wonder where she got that character?) large and in charge, and looming over the bad guy with a shotgun. You go, girl.
Like Huck, Freckles is poor, his mother is dead, he's ragged, and he has red hair and the concomitant tendency to cutaneous hyperpigmentation. He talks funny, too, even by late-19th-century US standards. This is noticed by the Scots-American businessman who hires him at the beginning of the novel.
Freckles stood, hat in hand, watching McLean.
"And what was it you thought I might be doing?" he asked.
The Boss could scarcely repress a start. Somewhere before accident and poverty there had been an ancestor who used cultivated English1, even with an accent. The boy spoke in a mellow Irish voice, sweet and pure2. It was scarcely definite enough to be called brogue, yet there was a trick in the turning of the sentence, the wrong sound of a letter here and there, that was almost irresistible to McLean, and presaged a misuse of infinitives and possessives with which he was very familiar and which touched him nearly. He was of foreign birth, and despite years of alienation, in times of strong feeling he committed inherited sins of accent and construction. – Gene Stratton-Porter, Freckles.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention: Freckles is missing his right hand. The story of how this happened is key to the plot. For 1904, this is an amazingly forward-thinking book. I urge you to read it, if only to see that it is possible to create characters like this believably. I also urge you to read it for the delightful wildlife stories in it. Drunken butterflies and sneaky bullfinches turn up, as well as courting vultures.
Of course, Freckles justifies McLean's faith in him. In spite of the fact that he is Irish, Freckles turns out to be an upright sort of fella. Well, of course it turns out Freckles' dad was the son of a nobleman from County Clare, but we forgive him because he sends his noble relatives packing when he finds out, because he's got what he wanted all along: something to do, and somebody to do it with. And Stratton-Porter's language, for its time, is straightforward, empathic, and downright heart-warming in places, even as it records the thought processes of a bygone time.
"Before God, I will!" He uttered the oath so impressively that the recording angel never winced as he posted it in the prayer column.
Okay. To sum up: to make up a youthful character, you need to try to remember what it was like to be young. You've got to get the hang of the way kids and teenagers think and act. And you should keep in mind that the reader is probably going to figure out what kind of kid you were from the way you write about them.
Me, I'd kind of like to be like Huck Finn. But I refuse to put on a dress.
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