Evergreen Dialogue

 I just finished the first draft of a contemporary children’s novel, and one of my biggest challenges was writing the dialogue. I know it seems counter-intuitive, but it was even harder than writing dialogue for my historical fiction. That’s because my historical books are frozen at one particular point in time, while contemporary fiction should normally be timeless.¹

There are exceptions, of course, such as contemporary fiction tied to current events. I’ve also read books where the writers are so intent on showing how well they understand the current generation that their fiction is outdated by the time it gets published.

Most contemporary fiction aims to stay current as time passes, however. This means that the language choices must be evergreen.

This is particularly important when using slang. I checked several sources and they aren’t entirely consistent about the specifics, but they all agree that slang means words that are used in a casual setting but are avoided in a formal one. For example, people often use “okay” or “awesome” in everyday conversation but you rarely find those words in an academic paper or a formal speech.

So why not avoid slang altogether? Unfortunately, that isn’t an option for a writer who wants to present a realistic picture. Take the book I’ve been working on as an example. The protagonist and her friends are preteens, so they would naturally use slang. If they didn’t, the story would become stilted and lose all authenticity. However, many of the slang words in use today are passing fads and would date the book. Even worse, they might not even be understood by my readers five years from now. The trick is to find slang words that have been part of the language for a long time and continue to be used and understood today. While there is no guarantee, this proven slang is more likely to stay evergreen than new words are.

In the graphic at the head of this page, the girl on the left is using current slang of recent origin, while the boy on the right is using evergreen slang.² I can’t predict what will happen with language in the future, of course. Maybe some of the words on the left will catch on and become evergreen, while some on the right might soon fall out of use. Still, if I don’t want my fiction to become dated, I’ll stick with the ones on the right.

Even so, I’m worried that limiting the dialogue to evergreen slang will make my characters sound too grown up. I’ll see how that works itself out in later drafts.

Next week I’ll talk about another issue that can date contemporary fiction.

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¹ For a discussion of slang in historical novels, see my blog posts from January 25, 2021 and February 1, 2021.

² “Adulting” means acting like a grown-up and doing things a real adult would do; “sus” is short for “suspicious”; “fire” is the same as “cool” or “awesome”; and “cooked” means exhausted or overwhelmed. Hopefully I don’t have to define the words on the right.