Does your character need to be roughly the same age as your target audience? Or at least in the same ballpark (i.e. kids for kids' fiction, adults for adult fiction, etc.)?
Joined: 31 Oct 2007 Posts: 203 Location: Vancouver, Canada
Age and Audience
Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2008 8:14 pm
I have always figured, with children's books, that the age of the main character should be one or two years older than the target audience. This comes from the theory that people don't want to read about characters who are too much like themselves. They want to feel the freedom of a character who is just a little bit bigger, stronger, and wiser. Since kids always feel that those a year or two older have got it made, and they can't wait to be just a little older, that makes them interested in characters of that sort.
I suspect that young adults follow the same pattern. Just as many of them woiuldn't be caught dead hanging around with a younger kid, they don't want to be caught reading a book about one.
With adults, it gets a bit more problematic. A lot of older adults are quite bored with the problems of twenty-somthings, and younger adutls find older people's problems incomprehensible, so they don't read so many books about each other. Otherwise, I think adults read pretty much everything.
Books with vastly different ages? To Kill a Mockingbird springs to mind. The pov character, Scout, is about 7 or 8 years old, I believe, and it's a popular book with YA to Adult readers. The main character in Dune is a teen-ager.
Having a good reader/audience age match is no silver bullet, though. The main character in Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood (Check the Reviews section of this 'zine) is somewhere around my age, and I found his problems singularly uninspiring.
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