So, CV Walter and I went to the Farmer’s Market together on Saturday. We encountered a great many people, some of whom were strikingly memorable. While the names were never known, someone out there is ending up in at least two stories.
This, of course, makes me panic a little, as I do not have small female children of my own, and must rely heavily on my experiences of being the Enabling Aunt (“You didn’t say I couldn’t buy them ice cream. It may be too windy for them to do sparklers out front, but the back deck is concrete, and in the lee of the house.” “It’s only a couch. They didn’t spill anything on it, and the cushions can be put back. In the meantime, it’s an impressive blanket fort, ain’t it?”)
Fortunately, I have friends who have small children, and friends whose small children have grown up now.
I got through the chapter okay. Whew!
…wait. They’re on an airship. It’s going to be a limited number of places to interact, so they will see this kiddo again. She may be a recurring character. Uh-oh.
CV Walter, meanwhile, wrote a chapter with two little kids reluctantly and disobediently “obeying” a direct and sharp order, which results in serious injury to the adult saving them from harm. I read it, and first recognized a certain small child… then I thought about it, and realized that she had written them exactly as annoying, disobedient, and inquisitive as many a small child I have endured until their parents removed them posthaste. This makes them rather unique in contemporary books, especially romance, where kids are usually adorable moppets who are cute and funny, and so sweet they’d melt in the rain.
I generally don’t like The Moppet Plot Device, because no small child I have dealt with can manage sickly sweet and obedient for long, much less the time span of an entire book.
When I tossed the alpha readers my own chapter, to see if I’d hit treacle, the response was “It’s good. Not too precocious.”
Which made me realize the existence of the problems with writing the correct age for the stated age of the child…
How do you handle plot moppets? Whence have they sprung up in your story?
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Plot moppets”
There’s some background “kids” in at least one or two of the Jaiya books, but they don’t really have enough pagetime to register as people. There’s a small boy in Wolf’s Trail who’s important for a chapter or two because he’s in danger, but he’s also shocked enough by what’s going on that he’s kind of subdued.
I try to make my characters fully realized people, even the kids. Of course, my plot moppets don’t look anything like yours. And why would they? Each child is seen from a different lens. The Enabling Aunt is much more likely to be delighted by rambunctious behavior than the Exhausted Parent.
I rarely had to remind my biological children to be on their best behavior because I’d done my best to civilize them before they went out into the world. To the point where they occasionally tried to civilize the other children they interacted with. And I’ve never hesitated to let a stranger’s child get stepped on or fall on their butt if they’ve deliberately ignored their parent telling them to behave. A well-placed hip to a child that’s getting underfoot can do wonders to get them to pay attention. That’s probably why I can do Chaos Moppets as well as the treacle sweet ones.
Getting the behavior right for the age can be difficult if you haven’t interacted with a child that age for a while. And, again, different lenses can make a completely average child look either precocious or delayed. Because there is such a wide range of possible behaviors, using the best one for the plot of the story is better than trying to force the story to conform to the supposed age of the child.
Oh, and thinking about it, I usually associate the adorable children on their best behavior in Romance books with the ones who are exhibiting a trauma response to having lost a parent, either through death or divorce. Which is a completely reasonable response for them to have and will likely influence their personality as they get older.
So, the funny, sweet, precocious children almost always read to me as someone who is trying to please the adults in their life to keep from being abandoned.
Oh boy —
Madeleine of Madeleine and the Mists starts with a two-year-old boy.
Alissandra of The Princess Seeks Her Fortune is not in one of those fairy tales where the story ends with her wedding, and so has two children by the end.
Katie of Witch-Prince Ways spends it rescuing her infant son — so he’s off-stage, mostly.
Lady Goldfinch of Never Comment On A Likeness has three sons, of whom only the third, the infant, makes an appearance.
Sanchia of Sword and Shadow has two daughters who are cameo appearances.
OTOH, Fever and Snow is about Pierre’s raising his daughter. Neige makes a lot of appearances.
There’s also a few children born after the climaxes whom I omit because they do not affect the plot itself.
Madeleine was the hardest because I had to ensure I always knew where he was.
In one series, I have a traumatized young teen boy (hid after the Big Bad caused the death of his parents and siblings despite all he could do). He encounters my hero who’s on a self-sacrificing mission against the same Big Bad, and the hero adopts him officially just before his own anticipated death. And then they both survive.
It was fun bringing the young “wolf” into the existing family fold. He takes on a dedicated “guard the new father & family approach” as a persona, having left childhood behind, and at a loss for how to truly blend in like an innocent. Like other trauma kids, he’s headed for early adulthood but keeps his native protectiveness and makes that his role. I loved the combo. His adoptive sibs are more observant about what he’s really like than the adults, who tend to overlook his somewhat subtle activities.
In retrospect, what made it so much fun was taking the “man as die-hard protector of family” trope and applying it to an adolescent, who isn’t usually forced to be so serious about life yet, while still retaining some of the age-appropriate joy in surprises and learning new skills. The juxtaposition was compelling.
Yeah, So I wrote about a six-year old with cancer in a murder mystery. Not a great book, I’ll just say. Karen’s vocabulary of ‘trauma kids’ is probably super on point, since a kid with cancer grows up really quickly. Anyway, trauma is only one reason that the stated age of a kid is going to be unhelpful for figuring out how a given child will react. Sarah Hoyt’s kid character in the Dyce Dare mysteries is an interesting example of moppets.
In the guise of helping you to write about kids, I’m going to tell a story. I went to a long and complicated event with two small boys. (5 and 7 years old, 2 1/2 hours of event plus and hour before and an hour after of stuff, minimum.) They were astoundingly good. I commented on how proud I was of them, to the person behind me, who was totally ready to praise them as well, since he had not been inconvenienced at all. The 7 year old gave a me a look and said, “We aren’t always this good.” Duly noted. I won’t count on it.
Keeping in mind that children are people, and thus are all different (to some degree), something that would be helpful even for people with lots of experience with littles is a book on child development. Because children are all different, but most children do go through pretty much the same stages of development at more or less the same ages (there are, of course, variations, but it helps to know what the norm is so you can do your variations intelligently). It is also useful to be able to spot where a child is significantly deviating from the norms, so you can try to figure out why, and (if possible) get them back on track. Such as the child who isn’t speaking by the time they are three or four years old. Some talk much earlier than that (Cedar was using complete sentences by the time she was two), but if they aren’t talking at least somewhat by the time they are three or four, you should take note and get some professional advice.
Character traits and affinities show up very early, too. One of my younger sisters has been very quiet since she was born, and she still is very quiet now that she’s sixty. My grandmother had a cousin who was a psychopath (he died when he was fifteen, doing something stupid that he wouldn’t have done if he’d had any concept of natural consequences — like, what do you think is going to happen if you jump off an overhanging branch onto a loaded log truck that’s going by below you? Dirt road, so it wasn’t going very fast, but still….Grandma said it was probably a blessing that he died young.) One of my brothers wanted nothing more than to get married, from the time he was little. You generally associate that with girls, right? This led to a poor choice for his first marriage, unfortunately. Another cousin has been in love with airplanes his whole life. He grew up in the Alaska bush, and just about his first word was ‘o-pane’ (for airplane). He has a small plane and still flies once in a while.
Spend some time with small children, watch them grow up, and see how they turn out. They are interesting people!