A lot of kids enjoy storytelling, whether that’s in roleplay, writing books, filming movies, or other such endeavors.
Some kids stop pursuing these things when they grow up. But there are others who don’t.
And yet, growing up as a writer, or any kind of storyteller really, means coming to terms with the fact that one day, your characters are not going to age with you. You can spend three years developing a book, a show, whatever, and all throughout they’ll stay 16, 22, 40. Unless something drastically happens to make them age (e.g. time skip), they’ll probably stay more constant in age than you as the creator will; time moving at different speeds and all.
And I think that sort of comes with the question of whether or not we can forget what youth really is like, because often it’s so easy to forget what you were like at 6, 8, 14 — and how accurately that is portrayed in your characters.
When you’re a storyteller, you learn to be a million different characters. You step into their shoes and use them to create stories and works of art.
But how many times have you read a book, or watched a movie, where the character doesn’t act their age? Sometimes this is done on purpose, but it can be jarring (often deliberately so). Take the Hunger Games, where the horror comes from watching children being forced to kill each other.
I wonder if the characters I create act older or younger than they really are, and I wonder how my readers will perceive them. (That’s where alpha/beta readers and rounds of editing come in handy.)
But in the end, does it matter? Characters are aged up or aged down depending on the target audience or genre of the book. Alternatively, maybe it’s the readers’ enjoyment of the story that matters more, and what they take away from it, rather than how old or young the characters act.
Characters are important, certainly. But it’s the journey they go on — the arc they go through — that makes them matter. They help to show the theme of the story you are telling. And maybe the depiction of youth and age isn’t as important in the grander scale of things, after all.
That’s all for now!
Thanks for listening to me ramble!
All the best,
