Repost from IJ - Talk amongst yourselves: Kids in fanfic?
Having read several fics recently that had Gus and JR talking to Brian or whomever, I started thinking about the use of children's dialogue in fic...
Okay, so I wanted to bring up something in B/J fics, and that is the use of kids talking, like Gus and JR. I don't know why, but I always have a hard time reading it, no matter how good the rest of the story is. For myself, I usually find it difficult to write dialogue for kids, maybe because it's really hard to do without making them sound too old or too young for their supposed age. I've also worked with a lot of kids from all different ages, and it's brilliant and silly and frightening some of the things that come out of their mouths.
Gus never had many lines on the show. I'm not sure if that's because CowLip didn't know how to write them in, but probably it's more likely that little kids as actors are hard to work with because of pesky things like child labor laws and nap times.
That's not to say that I couldn't read a fic with kids talking, it's just that I haven't found many that have hit the nail exactly on the head.