Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies

by Deborah Halverson

  Adjust the delivery to reflect a character’s confidence. Want to show a teen who lacks self-confidence or is too dependent upon others? Have her talk in questions: “I do it like this, right?” By contrast, a character who makes statements may be self-confident and independent: “I do it this way.” And a character who commands when he speaks simply oozes confidence: “Here. This way.” Of course, any one of these deliveries could be a ruse, with the character feeling just the opposite. Teens have been known to put on a tough-guy act. You get to decide whether to play it straight.

  Let characters blabber or be abrupt. When you want to show outgoing, open personalities or a sense of willingness in a character, assign him long chunks of dialogue, maybe without even letting the other person get a word in edgewise:

  “Oh, sure, come with me into the back, love. I’ve got what you need. Size six, right? People are always asking for size eight, so we’re out of that, but I can tell the six will do you fine. Here, can you hold this box? Not as heavy as it looks. That’s right, that end up. Now where did I put . . . ?”

  In contrast, short bits of dialogue are for shy, secretive, or reluctant characters:

  “Yeah, we got some. Somewhere.” Sigh. “I’ll check. Wait here.”

  Put their feet in their mouths. Let your teens blurt things out, inadvertently revealing bits of plot, personal secrets, or just more info than they want known, for whatever reason. Teens have fewer self-censoring mechanisms than adults do — they talk first and think second. And their tact is definitely still under construction. The next time you write a scene in which teens converse, let them blurt something out and then react; have them give voice to their judgments and then try to talk their way out of those spastic confessions.

  Interrupt them. A classic way to reveal mood in dialogue is through interruption. You can demonstrate a huge number of moods this way: anger, impatience, excitement, and resignation, to name a few. You pull off an interruption in written dialogue by letting one character cut another off, using an em-dash (—) to signal the break-in and following that immediately with the words that interrupt:

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Stop. Just stop.” John yanked his letterman jacket out of her hands. “I’m done with the lies.”

  For best effect, don’t immediately follow the em-dash with a narrative statement about the interruption, as in the following:

  “I didn’t mean—”

  John interrupted. “Stop. Just stop.”

  Describing the interruption blunts the impact. Let the interruption play itself out.

  Fragment their sentences and add hesitation. Break up dialogue with ellipses, those three dots that trail off sentences or indicate a stuttering of some kind in the middle. Ellipses can indicate a character who’s gathering his thoughts or somehow hesitant about what he’s saying:

  “You could . . . oh, I don’t know . . . try being nice to her, maybe?”

  You can also use ellipses for agitated or rushed talkers who can’t hold their focus:

  “I saw him go that way! He was just . . . just . . . just go after him, will you?”

  Expose their brains. Each character chooses words and strings sentences together in ways that reveal that person’s educational background and innate intelligence. Colloquial, formal, erudite, ignorant . . . the words that tumble from your characters’ lips tip off readers about individuals’ schooling and Mensa status. (See Chapter 9 for info on choosing words and styling your sentences.)

  Use a different voice for each character. Here’s where writing character thumbnails or full profiles (Chapter 5) for secondary characters pays off. When you know the personalities and background of everyone in the conversation, you can sculpt distinct verbal tendencies (such as interrupting or running their mouths) for each character, creating flavorful and distinctive dialogue.

  You have a lot of tricks up your sleeve; pull them out when things get heated. Conflict can be scary, so some writers shy away from verbal tussles, but don’t be intimidated. Characters who argue are filled with emotion, and those emotions can easily get the better of them, leading to all-out conflict. Yank on heartstrings or make blood boil by writing exchanges that combine interruption with fragmenting with mixed messages with blurting. Verbal conflict isn’t just about causing distress; it’s another clever tool for revelation. Plus, it can allow one character to lead another to awareness or somehow influence her attitude or behavior — which leads to character revelation and growth, pushing the plot forward in the process.

  Worried that a conversation feels one-sided? Rewrite it from the other character’s point of view. Rewriting allows you to understand how all the characters feel about what’s being said and about the situation in general so you can accurately portray everyone’s social nuances and moods in the official version.

  Delivering information: Loose lips reveal plot and backstory

  Dialogue is a dynamic way to convey plot and backstory facts and for pushing the plot forward. But be warned: Dialogue that’s included simply for fact delivery won’t sweep any teens off their feet. You need to sneak in the facts and give the story a nudge forward without boring anybody in the process.

  There’s no law against having one character tell another one the facts. In some situations, fact-delivery can be useful, such as when characters are plotting to break into their school or lead an army into the Dark Wizard’s fortress. It’s just that a chat focusing on facts can come across as your feeding info to the audience rather than your characters’ engaging in a natural back-and-forth. And you’re all about authentic conversation, right?

  Here are some tactics for delivering facts in a way that spurs the characters into action, pushing the plot forward:

  Frame your facts as concerns. If you’re writing an adventure tale, you may write, “There’s no way we can cross that. Shoot, Torrie, that rope was everything. Now how are we going to cross?” This line focuses on the character’s concern for the success of their entire adventure. Contrast it with this line of dialogue, which focuses on the facts of the challenge: “We have to cross the chasm to get there, and it’s fifty feet wide. We need a rope to cross it.” Both versions get the point across, but the first carries more tension and emotion because the character is voicing a big-picture concern rather than explaining the facts. Here’s another example, from a contemporary YA romance. The first version is heavy on facts:

  “I’m afraid Todd is cheating on me. He disappears several afternoons a week and won’t tell me where he was.”

  This revelation isn’t as energetic as the second version, which focuses on how those facts impact the speaker:

  “Todd’s not coming. He finally realized I’m a total loser and he’s going to stay away forever and I’m going to grow old and lonely like Miss Eugenia and no one’s coming to my funeral and that just sucks.”

  Now that’s concern, run through a teen’s grandiose, self-obsessed mind without a filter in sight.

  Tell characters something they don’t know. People don’t usually tell each other what they already know, as in, “Remember? Dad lost his job three months ago because he can’t speak up for himself.” That never sounds realistic.

  Tease readers with bits. Give readers part of the facts in the dialogue but not all of them. I talk about sprinkling plot facts and backstory into the narrative in Chapter 7. Dialogue is a great venue for sprinkling. You can make readers wonder about what you’ve left out to entice them to stick with the story.

  Blurt out the facts. Not only does speaking before thinking reveal character personalities, but it reveals plot facts, too. Blurting is a wonderful tool for pushing the plot forward because characters are forced to deal with the revelation once it’s out there.

  Extend one character’s statement of fact into a full and entertaining conversation between characters. Go ahead and lay those fac
ts on readers in full, only do it in an entertaining way that starts the scene at one point and escalates it to another. For example, you could have a character say the following:

  “Shelley’s not home. I think she’s gone to that park down by Joey’s house. Only, Rachel trains her dogs there. If she sees Joey and Shelley together, it won’t be good. We have to get down there!” Luke ran down the driveway.

  This dialogue does its job — delivering the facts and nudging the plot forward to the next phase — but that’s it. Not a lick of entertainment in it. Blah. Instead, get those facts across winningly through a back-and-forth conversation, with the characters using sentence fragments and cutting each other off and discovering things and reacting to epiphanies:

  “Where’d Shelly go?”

  “The park, probably.”

  “Thanks a lot. There’s only a million parks in town.”

  “Not by Joey’s house.”

  “Joey’s house? No way. Please tell me she didn’t go there.”

  “What? It’s just a park.”

  “Rachel trains her dog there. If she sees those two together . . .”

  “Aw, man, you’re right. We have to get down there.”

  Luke didn’t answer. He was already running down the driveway.

  Frame it as gossip. Whether you’re writing a contemporary story, historical fiction, a fantasy, or a futuristic adventure, teens love talking smack, dissing, and spilling the beans about other people (so do grown-ups, really, but for the most part they know what discretion means). Teens haven’t fully internalized that lesson about locking their lips and throwing away the key. Tact is certainly not their friend yet, nor do teens shine at anticipating consequences. Sometimes, teens just plain like being up in somebody’s business. Gossip in dialogue is a treasure chest of revelation and story advancement.

  Choosing the setting: Their “where” determines their words

  Setting is a powerful storytelling element, and it certainly makes its mark on dialogue. Where you set a scene shapes what the characters in the scene say and how they say it. They fill their dialogue with words that reflect their region, social context, and time period. Characters in a blustery outdoor setting, for example, talk in a very different way about their chores than they would if they were sitting at the school desks during a film, speaking behind their hands. Kids in California during the Gold Rush would speak differently about their chores than kids on a California beach during the 1960s. You can read about the power of setting in characterization in Chapter 8 and as an influence on narrative voice in Chapter 9. Here, I want you to realize that your setting choices determine the kids’ spoken words and affect the actions they take in the narrative beats surrounding it.

  Move characters to a different location for their conversation if you have a scene that seems to fall flat, that doesn’t have the tension you want, or that just has characters sitting at a table talking back and forth, leaving you with few opportunities for narrative beat action beyond “he turned to her and scowled.” The shake-up can be just what you needed to jog the emotion loose.

  Find out just how important the location of the conversation really is. Write a conversation between a couple of teens. Then write a second version, keeping the same goal for the conversation but changing one key thing about the setting. For example, try setting the first version in a private place, where the characters can shout and get wild, and then move them someplace public, such as a fancy restaurant in which they must whisper and are frequently interrupted by waiters. Or set the first version in class, where half of the discussion must take place through note-passing; then move the conversation to the baseball dugout, with the characters running off for an at-bat or a turn at shortstop and then returning to resume the conversation. How much does this affect the content or the wording they choose? Adjust the weather, temperature, and lighting conditions accordingly, and let the characters interact with props as they try to maintain their trains of thought.

  Author Deborah Wiles talks dialect in dialogue

  I’ll never forget the back-and-forth I had with a copy editor over a line from my first book, Freedom Summer. My young narrator says, “Mama helps my plate with peas.” The copy editor kept changing “helps” to “heaps,” even after I had explained that this was typical Southern speech. Finally, I sent the manuscript to my editor with a huge, handwritten “HELPS! HELPS! HELPS!” on that particular page. And the book went to print with the just-right word in that sentence.

  Dialogue is the primary way I capture character and the flavor of a time and place. I’m a Southern writer, and I remember what it’s like to watch moths dance around a porch light at night, and to smell my grandmother in Cashmere Bouquet after her afternoon bath, and to eat boiled peanuts with my brother, so I have my characters talk about these sorts of specific details just as naturally as they would talk about the weather.

  Every time my characters open their mouths, they give the reader a glimpse into who they are. Comfort tells us how to behave at a funeral, and you get a sense of her. Ruby reads the dictionary out loud to her chickens. John Henry tells his friend, “I wanted to swim in that pool! I want to do everything you can do!” and we know how angry he is — we don’t have to be told. There is an energy in dialogue that pushes the story forward and hooks the reader.

  In dialogue, characters offer up their hearts. Sometimes those hearts break. Sometimes they are angry, sometimes they are joyful, sometimes they are curious, or scared, or silly. I try to remember that every emotion has a corresponding action, and that action is often best expressed in dialogue that offers up a unique character in a specific time and place.

  Deborah Wiles is the author of picture books and novels for young readers including Each Little Bird That Sings, a National Book Award Finalist, and Countdown, book one of The Sixties Trilogy: Three Novels of the 1960s for Young Readers. She teaches and writes from Atlanta, Georgia. To find out more about Deborah Wiles, go to www.deborahwiles.com.

  Even Old People Can Sound Young

  Teens don’t talk like grown-ups . . . but grown-ups can talk like teens! Embrace these four guiding principals as you defy your age to create young-sounding, youth-pleasing dialogue.

  Rediscovering your immaturity

  Youthful dialogue uses less-sophisticated words and phrases than adult dialogue, and it spins conversations as if they revolve around the teen who’s speaking (even if they don’t). Remember, teens tend to be a self-absorbed lot. With this teen mindset engaged, your character would be more likely to say, “I can’t stand school” than, “School is boring.” He may grumble, “I can’t suffer his rules any longer,” instead of “The King is a cruel man.” Or he may complain, “My dad never listens to me,” instead of “My dad is hard to reach.” The shift in focus can be subtle, but it’s an important one. In Chapter 9, I talk about teen sensibility and hyperbole in narrative voice. The principles are the same for dialogue: A teen or tween talks about what he wants to do and how things that others do affect him.

  Teens and tweens may also talk in exaggerations, revealing grandiose mindsets. They say “I’m a total loser” or “Everything’s ruined now” or “I’ll never be able to show my face” because they’re still learning to put things into perspective. For teens and tweens, everything feels immediate and full of impact. Their feelings tend to be easily triggered, whereas adults have learned to buffer and blow off. (On their good days, anyway.)

  The actual words spoken must be simple, too. In the narration, you usually have a little more leeway to use bigger words, and you can get spicy with verbs. But although “lounging” and “percolating” can be perfect in narrative, they’d be more convincing as “laying around” and “all bubbly” in teenspeak. Kids don’t generally break out the 50-cent words in normal dialogue.

  Go ahead and bust out big words and formal diction in dialogue when you want characters to m
ock formality, show off superior intelligence, or try to impress someone. There’s a time and place for everything, including fancy talk.

  Relaxing the grammar

  Writing realistic, youthful dialogue often means ditching stiff, proper, grown-up delivery and embracing casual syntax instead. Some teens string their words together in a footloose fashion — and throw in a little bad grammar while they’re at it. Consider: “You need to stop doing that” or “Stop running in the hall.” At best, those lines are dull. There’s certainly no youthfulness in them. Instead, a teen may say, “Don’t be doing that” or “Quit with all the running.” You may need to toss a blanket over your signed copy of Elements of Style before attempting this kind of anarchy, but it really will make for more natural teen dialogue.

  Listening to kids talk — at the dinner table, at the mall, wherever — is a great way to study how teens put words together. Later, read your dialogue aloud to judge whether it jives with what you’re hearing.

  Even formal historical fiction benefits from more-relaxed syntax for the younger characters in the cast. Give them run-on sentences, dialogue that doubles back on itself, incomplete sentences, and improper grammar, as in the following examples:

  Example 1

  “He laughed and took the whip from my hand and said ‘Run on home, Rudy,’ like I wasn’t already out of knickers and needed someone minding me. Gah. I swear on Mama’s grave, Old Tate is the Devil hisself.”