You know the feeling. You’re reading a book about characters that are allegedly your age. And yet, they don’t read like your age at all. They’re teenagers who supposedly have full-time jobs and mortgages, or alternatively, they’re tiny adults baby talking. The author tells you the literal age, but they simply don’t read that way.

It takes some skill to write characters of ages you’re not, and particularly of ages you’ve never been. Sometimes it can even be a challenge to write characters who are your age, if you haven’t read many books where the characters are that age. (As we all know, women characters dissolve into sea foam at about 25.)

So here are a few things I’ve learned about writing characters of various ages.

Children characters

You would think it would be easy to write child characters. After all, we all were kids once. But you may not remember it very well, and you certainly don’t know what you seemed like from the outside.

There’s really no substitute for getting to know some real kids. And then, don’t mash all their characteristics and funny lines together. As closely as possible, try to follow the developmental stages of a single kid, or a specific age of kid. Too many authors throw two-year-old traits and ten-year-old traits into one child character and call the kid six. Come on.

Kids don’t know a lot, but they’re as rational beings as the rest of us. When writing their interiority, use smaller words and account for what they don’t know, but don’t write them as stupid. They’re just trying to figure out the world.

Kids have huge emotions about things but may not be good about describing those feelings. Or they’re embarrassed about it. So they might say something like, “After that happened, I had to go hide under my bed for a while.”

From the outside, you’ll need to give them age-appropriate speech patterns. By about six, kids talk like adults, just with a smaller vocabulary. Don’t make them baby talk unless they’re actual toddlers. For more specifics, again, you’ve got to get to know some kids.

Favorite child character: Sam, from I am Sam and Attaboy Sam, by Lois Lowry. We get right in his head, and his thoughts make perfect sense given what he knows and what he doesn’t.

Teenage characters

Teenagers live in a boiling emotional soup at all times. I think that’s why people enjoy writing about them so much. You can go ahead and throw in any amount of drama and it’s not unrealistic.

There’s also romance, which again is chock full of drama. Every misunderstanding is worth days of crying. There are shouting fights and then passionate kissing. Characters who aren’t in romances yet might be figuring out what they want or don’t want in a romance, which is also character growth gold.

Teenagers often define themselves in opposition to whatever they see as controlling them. That makes them the best people to take down a dystopia—they’re not yet used to being controlled or cynical about their odds of success. They’ll simply throw themselves at the problem. However, they make very annoying underlings. If they join the military, revolution, etc. under the authority of adults, they’re probably going to push back a lot and frustrate everyone who’s been doing the work longer.

They’re desperate to get to work doing something genuinely important, to change the world. But that emotional volatility gets them down sometimes. They will miss work because they had a breakup. They blow up about things they were supposed to keep secret.

They’re very peer-dependent. They associate mainly with people close in age and mistrust adults. Their friends are very important to them, but those friendships may not be stable, constantly shifting or blowing up.

Their main history is their childhood. So if you want to talk about backstory, trauma, that kind of thing, the only option is whatever happened in their childhood. Conflict with their parents is a major thing; if their parents aren’t around, they still think about them all the time and focus a lot on any traumas their parents gave them.

The real challenge here is to avoid these things if you’re not writing teenagers. Adults generally do not fall down on the floor when they’re upset, scream confidential secrets at people, have fights with their friends constantly, and so on. These are traits that will get your characters labeled “YA-ish,” which may be the opposite of what you want.

Favorite teenage character: Katniss Everdeen. She’s mature for her age, due to having had to take on so much responsibility, but she still doesn’t grasp at all a lot of the politics going on around her. She absolutely would dedicate her life to a single cause in a heartbeat. This doesn’t mean she can pick a boyfriend in under three books.

Twenties

This is probably the most common age for book heroes to be. They’re adults, but it’s the fun and exciting part of adulthood where you don’t have too many responsibilities.

People in their twenties are generally responsible for themselves, but they’re deeply concerned with finding their place: the right job, the right partner, the right home. Some are dodging the pressure to settle down, others are worried they won’t be able to settle down “in time,” whatever that means to them.

A lot of people spend their twenties dating a lot; others don’t at all. It’s not at all unusual for a person to reach 30 without any dating or sexual history. But if they’re single, they probably already feel like everyone else is dating, and they may be getting pressure from outside to date more or to settle down permanently.

People in their twenties know about adulting, but they still think of it as adulting. It’s not second nature yet. They often wish for an adultier adult to come help them out. At the same time, they sometimes resent being seen as inexperienced by those adultier adults.

In a twenties friend group, one person may be a permanent globetrotter with no partner and no fixed address, one may be still living with their parents, one may be running a several million dollar startup, and one may be married with two kids. It doesn’t seem like it’s a fixed life stage at all; everybody’s in very different places.

But the one thing that does seem consistent is that everyone’s slowly settling into the kind of person they want to be. Most of my friends had a big revolution in their mindset in their late 20s and cast off a lot of their previous worldview. That’s the result, I think, of actually living as an adult in the life they grew up thinking they’d have and finding it didn’t fit. A lot of people discover their orientation or change their religion in their late twenties. It’s a great time for characters to have a big life-changing adventure.

As far as history goes, these characters still don’t have a lot. They may have had a few pivotal moments so far. But still, their family of origin is going to loom large, whether in presence or in absence. It’s very reasonable for a person who is 24 to blame their dad for all their problems, because at 24 most of your problems do come from the time when your dad was a key influence!

Favorite young adult character: Miles Vorkosigan. We get to follow him through this whole stage as he works himself out, riding the roller coaster of his alternating unearned confidence and massive imposter syndrome. He’s so competent in some ways, and yet he is so bad with relationships at first!

Thirties, Forties, Fifties

This is peak adulthood, the age of character you pick when you want to write about established professionals. These people have history behind them now that has nothing to do with their parents. To me, that’s the key thing you want to fit in: give these people plausible backstories that take up the time required. Think of any forty-year-old you know. I bet not one of them has just been doing one thing their whole adult life.

They have probably worked out their relationship with their parents, whether by cutting ties or developing the kind of boundaries that make parent-child relationships work. They also have moved past most of their childhood trauma: it still sits with them, but they know how to handle it and it doesn’t come up constantly anymore (hopefully). The adult parts of their history probably loom larger: the big events in their 20s that went wrong, people they’ve lost, relationships that didn’t work out.

People in this stage no longer segregate into age groups. They probably have friends of all ages: younger people they work with or mentor, older people who once mentored them, and of course their own children if they have any. Once you’re fully transitioned into adult society, there’s really no reason to hang out with people your own exact age. That’s why it’s normal for forty-year-olds to date sixty-year-olds—in their circles, at work or socially, they’ve been hanging out with those people already. They’re peers.

Parents will focus on parenthood more than anything else, as long as their kids are with them. Remember, when writing a parent character, that the kid always has to be somewhere, being watched by somebody. That was the biggest challenge of Invasive, giving both parents adventures while still not leaving Lily and Colt unattended. A parent never forgets their responsibility for their kids.

Characters who aren’t parents may still have shifted into looking out for others around them: they may have pets, aging parents they take care of, vulnerable friends they look out for, volunteer work they do. You’ve hopefully gotten your own oxygen mask on by now, so you turn to help others. My same-age friends are pillars of the community in one way or another: they remember people’s birthdays; they drive their friends to the hospital; they give money to gofundmes; they have a few causes they care about a lot. Not all characters will be this selfless, but it’s a lot more normal now than in your twenties, when you’re barely holding it together.

Again, this complicates adventures. These are not people who can walk out the front door and all the way to Mount Doom. They have to find someone to watch the cat, get time off of work, beg off babysitting their niblings. There’s a lot of life that has to be wound down or worked around for their adventures, because they’re often deeply embedded in their communities. If they’re not, it’s no longer a coincidental fact, like when a 22-year-old has no roots. It’s a big sign of what kind of character they are, that they have chosen or been forced into a life with few connections.

Favorite character in this stage: Grace, from Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher. Honestly all the main characters in the series are in this life stage, and they all wear it wonderfully.

Seniors

Once a character is reaching retirement age, their history and backstory is long. You want to make sure we feel that, more than anything else. They may have had more than one decades-long relationship. They may have grown children. Both of those are relationships they will think about constantly, whether they’re still around and doing well or not.

History is important to all characters, but especially now. I’ve found a lot of older people have specific parts of their history they want to talk about all the time. One man in his seventies I used to talk to had a habit of trying to remember in detail what all the stamps in his WWII ration book were and what they were worth. Because it was something he remembered that nobody around him did, and he felt we needed to know.

They may feel displaced in time, especially if they live in a society like ours that changes quickly. Everyone’s doing their newfangled whatsits, they don’t know how to use the whatsit and they’re annoyed to be expected to, when the old thing worked fine. Kids these days have all kinds of new expectations and customs, which they may despise or admire. Maybe a little of both, if they envy the newer generation benefits they had to do without.

As they get older, people’s bodies start to fail, and that’s so frustrating. From the outside, we see that old people can’t move around so well anymore. But imagine how it feels from the inside, when that person has decades of habits they built in better times. They expect to be able to go work in the garden every day, and they can’t. Or they can, but at the price of a lot of pain. It’s a difficult thing to go through, and hard to choose between pain and constrained freedom.

Old people are cranky a lot, and I can hardly blame them. If you were in pain all the time, couldn’t do your favorite activities, and people without half your life experience patronized you all the time, you’d be cranky too.

Favorite senior character: Ofelia from Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon

To sum up

People vary wildly, and age is far from the only factor. The important thing, when writing characters of various ages, is to consider how that person’s particular life up to now has shaped them. A small child isn’t just a small child, they’re a particular small child. An old lady is never just an old lady, she’s a woman who has been through the equivalent of a whole series of novels and been marked by it.

Authors who throw in a character of a given age and expect that to be their only character trait end up writing what almost feels like a parody. If the only thing about a given six-year-old is that they are six, then they’re not a fully-developed character.

But I do think it’s important to write them as believably six. Think about individual six-year-olds you know, what they have in common and what is unique about each. If you don’t know multiple people of a given age…perhaps get to know a few first.

Housekeeping notes

This week my Queer Heroes Sale is going on. In addition, Bisection is in the Bi & Pan Authors itch bundle. Happy Pride!