by Anne E. Johnson
Making characters talk in a middle-grade story or novel is not the same thing as writing for very young children. Needless to say, as kids get older they can follow (and appreciate) more complicated dialog. However, increasing vocabulary is not the only factor that distinguishes dialog for this age group.
Keep It Wondrous
One marker shared by the best MG lit is imagination. And, just as the stories are often full of wonder, let the characters reflect that in their voices.
In her novel Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, inspired by ancient Chinese folklore, Grace Lin uses arcane, stylized language with no slang and very few contractions. Stripping the language of artifice and modernity gives a specific atmosphere.
In one scene, the main character’s Ma and Ba (father) are worried about their missing daughter. Their fish (!) gives them enigmatic wisdom:
“There is fear in the wind,” the fish said, “great worry.”
“Is it a storm?” Ma asked.
Ba looked at the fish. It stared at him with big eyes.
“I’m not sure,” said Ba.
Keep It Personal
With increased comprehension comes increased demand for details by the reader. Let each character have his or her own style of speech and favorite topics to talk about.
Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Framed is a humorous contemporary novel about a boy in a small town. In that context, every single character is visible and important.
Here a girl nicknamed Terrible Evans, who is obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, sits next to the main character and spews forth trivia rather than making conversation. (Know anyone like that? I do, too.):
“Did you know,” she said, “that in the original comic, Splinter wasn’t a mutant rat?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“In the telly series, splinter is a rat who used to be a human. But in the comics he’s a rat who was always a rat. On telly he used to be Hamato Yoshi, who mutated into a rat because of a mutagen…”
And on and on. Although this conversation does not contribute substantively to the plot, it tells the reader volumes about both the character speaking and the character patient enough to hear her out.
Keep It Loose
When kids talk to each other, it’s practically a different language from the one they use around adults. This is particularly true when the kids have a lot of shared experience, such as schoolmates.
A Crooked Kind of Perfect, by Linda Urban, shows some good examples of capturing this in dialog. During one conversation between the main character and a boy she knows, notice how little narration and tagging there is. The words spill out in a believably fluent way:
“You were pretty mad out there,” Wheeler says.
“You were pretty mad yesterday,” I say.
“Was not.”
“You punched a bird.”
“A fake bird,” he says. He shoves his hands in his jacket pockets.
Keep It Silly
And the most important advice of all for the writer of middle-grade lit: Let your imagination be sprinkled with humor.
And you can’t get more humorous or imaginative than the late, great Terry Pratchett. Here is an exquisitely bizarre excerpt from his first Tiffany Aching novel, The Wee Free Men:
“There really is a school for witches?” said Tiffany.
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” said Miss Tick.
“Where?”
“Very close.”
“Is it magical?”
“Very magical.”
“A wonderful place?”
“There’s nowhere quite like it.”
“Can I go there by magic? Does, like, a unicorn turn up to carry me there or something?”
“Why should it? A unicorn is nothing more than a big horse that comes to a point anyway. Nothing to get so excited about,” said Miss Tick.
Which middle grade novels do you think have the best dialog?
And the most important advice of all for the writer of middle-grade lit: Let your imagination be sprinkled with humor.
Most middle school readers wonder
if they were adopted. Some actually revel in it: who are these people, and
why can’t they understand me? Clearly my own people are elsewhere. Middle
grade readers are going through so many emotional, physical and psychological
changes that it’s not surprising that they are drawn to books about other
children who don’t know who they are. Here are a few suggested books with this
theme.
THE CLAY WAR is sort of a twist on the concept of urban fantasy. One minute, a girl named Shelly is replanting her father's flowers on her fire escape at home in Detroit. The next minute, she's in a strange land, with two rival fairy battalions charging toward her, wings buzzing and weapons raised.
THINGS FROM OTHER WORLDS
I can honestly say that my latest book, The Candle Maker, was an absolute joy to write—possibly due to writing in the era of “A Christmas Carol”, which always warms the cockles of my English heart. I’m a multi-genre author, and sometimes I get a little turned around writing about a cute, displaced Octopus one day and an angsty, teenaged ballerina the next, but The Candle Maker was one of those stories that comes without the losing of hair or sanity. Bonus! 
I'm starting to feel like an old hand at this weekly column-writing gig. The way my brain functions, I can get nearly anything done if I think of it as a series of tasks and schedule those tasks in some sort of regular pattern. Seems to be working for my Kid Lit Insider column on Eat Sleep Write.
