Using "kid speak" in a first person story

[curious_guy (imported)]

I know that I should Use "kid speak" in the dialog of a first person story when a child is speaking. Should I also use it when the young protagonist is describing things?

[Paolo]

If you're writing it in first person (the kid is narrating) then yes.

If you're writing it in third person, then no.

If you want a real challenge, try writing one from the perspective of a 14 yo. that's being raised in Britain, after growing up somewhere in Asia, and then comes to America...talk about a mix.

As the conversation with The Fraj went here, last year at the MOM - is it a van, a truck, a semi, or a lorry? He was like, "A semi-what?" and I was saying, "What's a bloody lorry?" Funny how those words rub off on you!

[texmec (imported)]

Yes, if any character has a unique way of speaking, particularly due to age, and you want to emphasize that, you can retain your omniscient God-like powers and continue to describe things in the third person as yourself the author, but also switch into the mind set, the interior dialog or thoughts of a character, and in and out again.

The author is literally God but we have to follow what he's doing and where's he's floating.

If you start a story:

The mountains of Montana are specactular....

Then that's true because you just said so, whether you're above them or standing before them ,and we as the reader cannot dispute your creation or judgment or scenes or characters.

A helpful device might be then to establish as quickly as possible that a character speaks in a particular way by traditional first person quoted dialogue:

Jeffrey, clutching his airport luggage, ran over to his friend Mark and said "Dude! Fucking shit man, this is awesome!"

Now we know how Jeffrey speaks, and actually, how he thinks. We don't yet know what age he is. While not impossible that he's five years old or 85 years old, the chances of that are already pretty slim. At this point we're already assuming an age somewhere between 15-25, say, something like that.

You can do both at once, being the intelligent articulate descriptive God author and describing in the third person yet immediately get into the thoughts of Jeffrey without quotes because only God knows that and has the authority to relate it:

As the sparkling plane descended and finally afforded a close of up view of the spectacular mountains of Montana, Jeffrey looked out his window and knew(or felt or thought), whoa, Dude, this was going to be fucking awesome. The plane landed.

You just established how you describe and articulate, and you just telegraphed to us the speech patterns and thoughts of Jeffrey before he's met anybody or said anything to another person and you are not quoting, you are all-knowing and now so are we. You floated into him, you floated out, in a flash, you took us with you.

You can deliberately overdo it in direct quotes if it's true that Jeffrey speaks like that at least to certain people at certain times and you really want that known.

You could establish that so much, even in a book with chapters, so that if the first two are written in normal points of view, but the reader turns to the third chapter which starts out:

Shit, man, this is too fucking much ...and we all know we're going to journey along inside Jeffrey's head because we already know it can only be Jeffrey

Best.

[Gil (imported)]

If you're writing it in first person (the kid is narrating) then yes.

If you're writing it in third person, then no.

If you want a real challenge, try writing one from the perspective of a 14 yo. that's being raised in Britain, after growing up somewhere in Asia, and then comes to America...talk about a mix.

As the conversation with The Fraj went here, last year at the MOM - is it a van, a truck, a semi, or a lorry? He was like, "A semi-what?" and I was saying, "What's a bloody lorry?" Funny how those words rub off on you!

An interesting twist on this is something Larry McMurtry does occasionally. Typically he writes in third person omniscient. But I've seen cases where he is describing a character's experiences (usually bad), and he drops the omniscience, narrating instead from the limited point of view of the character. But still in third person. This has a very charming and engaging effect, especially when the character is innocent. Trying to describe it is like attempting to describe a performance of Blue Man Group. An example is a passage in "Streets of Laredo", where the reader is filled in on the experiences of a 15 year old newly wed bide whose young husband, a deputy, is sent out to track down some bad hombres. We learn how nice and helpful the husband's boss, the sheriff, is to the young bride. That's how the innocent bride sees it. We the readers see how the randy old bastard is taking advantage of the husband's absence to have his way with the girl. A great effect, but damned hard to pull off. I've tried.

[Slammr (imported)]

Many 3rd person stories are written in the 'voice' of one person or the other. Orson Scott Card in his Seventh Son series uses it. Instead of telling the story from an omniscient point of view, he tells it from the point of view of different characters in the story, and as he does, he tells it in that character's vernacular. You see the story unfold as if you were inside that character's mind, and you hear it told as he would tell it. It's definitely not something easily accomplished.

I often use 3rd person but tell the story as if I were inside one character's mind. When I do, I usually also use the 'voice' of that person to tell the story even though it is written 3rd person.

If you're writing the story from an omniscient point of view, then you would not want to use the 'voice' of the character, unless, if as Gil noted, you use it occasionally to give the reader a peek into a character's mind.

[Paolo]

"The Tales of Alvin Maker," of which "Seventh Son" is the first volume, is a GREAT series. In each book, there's also an allusion or minor mention of castration, too. I think it's in Book 2 where one of the town "menfolk", older and wiser, says something like, "I knew we should'a castrated that boy when he was little."

Not that this has anything to do with this posting, but...

[Slammr (imported)]

"The Tales of Alvin Maker," of which "Seventh Son" is the first volume, is a GREAT series. In each book, there's also an allusion or minor mention of castration, too. I think it's in Book 2 where one of the town "menfolk", older and wiser, says something like, "I knew we should'a castrated that boy when he was little."

Not that this has anything to do with this posting, but...

Again, not that it has anything to do with this thread, but Card touches on castration in several of his books. In Songmaster, he effectively chemically castrates his hero, and there's another book - can't think of the title right now - in which the hero hears the screams of slaves being castrated in the square.