How Old Do Characters Sound?

Okay, time for the first post about serious writerly matters- the perceived ages of characters based on dialogue and their internal motivations. This is something I am actually quite terrible at which is as good a reason as any to start with it. It's important to air all my story's dirty laundry right off, as I have no readers and don't really care to seek any out. Until some show up, these posts are merely to work out some things. Hopefully they will someday be discovered and found useful by someone else.

On to the topic at hand- setting the age of characters by how they speak. The heroes of my current story are all teenagers, between fifteen and sixteen and yet they read a lot younger. The writing class two weeks ago gave me some important insight into why this is. Hopefully, this will help anyone having the same problems. Here are the reasons why they sound young and some possible solutions I will be implementing in the new draft.

REASON 1) USE OF PROFANITY

I tried to give the characters a rough vocabulary to simulate the tossed-off conversations of mid-teens, but overdid it. Sentences punctuated with crude language sound more like 12 year olds trying to reach up and speak like an older teen. By the time real people are fifteen, the novelty wears off a bit, and word choice is clearer and less needlessly macho. I lost track of this in the struggle to give them a lived-in quality. Making that mistake was very easy, so I'm positive I'm not the only one doing it.

REASON 2) WHERE'S THE SEX?

Since the cast of chapter 1 is overwhelmingly male, I forgot one key element- even if there aren't girls in sight, that doesn't mean they won't be on these kids' minds. At 15, the body is a mass of conflicted feelings and desires, most of which have some sort of sexual underpinnings. "They would be thinking about girls constantly" was the consensus from the class. I was blind to miss it. As an aside, one classmate response to this was "Maybe they're just gay." The professor's response, of course, "Fine, then they'd be thinking about boys!" The take-away is that even though there's no sexual encounters in the chapter, these characters WILL have it on their minds.

The other problem with the dialogue was that I am writing in a parallel world and the characters spoke like Americans from the present day. But that is for another post.

SONG OF THE POST

Flash Delirium by MGMT