In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 216.
In the mesmerizing 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild, directed by Benh Zeitlin, nine-year-old Hushpuppy, living in a bayou community called the Bathtub, punches her father in the chest during a fight. A sonic boom strikes—is it thunder? Then her dad collapses, gripped in a seizure. We cut to falling glaciers, an ice shelf crumbling, the universe unraveling before our eyes, and Hushpuppy runs away. “Momma!” she cries, as waters rise around her feet. “I think I broke something.”
The difficulty of writing child protagonists in fiction boils down to agency. When we’re children, life happens to us. Parents divorce; people die. Or, as is the case for Sissy, the 12-year-old protagonist in my coming-of-age novel, Amphibian (Ig Publishing, 2024), her mother’s poor mental health leads to their itinerant and isolated existence. Sissy’s only real power lies in how she handles it. See, a child reacts to the world around them. But, as readers, we want to see our characters take action.
In film this is especially true: Good characters should face dilemmas, which force them to make choices, and those choices have consequences, which move the story along and ultimately decide the characters’ fate. The stakes of the story must be, at least in part, in the characters’ hands.
Many coming-of-age novels deal with this issue by using past-tense adult narration to frame the story, thereby showing the later-life consequences of what happened during the protagonist’s adolescence and creating meaning through hindsight. But I didn’t want to do this in Amphibian. Girlhood is a time when we’re often overlooked, and I wanted to validate Sissy’s perspective as worthy in and of itself. By using first-person present tense, I could embody my reader in the radical, transformative experience of growing up a girl, without the safe distance of adult narration to mediate or make meaning. But then, how to give her agency while keeping it realistic and believable for her age?
Flashbacks and reflective adult voice-overs aside, we don’t get the benefit of hindsight in movies. There is no past-tense. As viewers, we make meaning in the moment, much like we do as children. So, I wondered, how had directors—specifically of movies with young protagonists—engaged the viewer in the stakes of the story when their young characters have limited control over the world around them?
In film, the camera is our surrogate—our eyes—and the framing of a scene, for example the proximity to a character, signifies our point of view. When filming The Florida Project, Sean Baker kept the camera low to the ground, so it feels like we’re sharing in six-year-old Moonee’s worldview. The bright, purple-toned color palette conjures childhood juxtaposed with the gritty reality of the down-and-out motel where she lives with her young, out-of-work mom. Baker grants Moonee agency through her defiant exuberance; we’re rooting for her spirit to remain intact despite the escalating crises in the adult world around her. Defiance has long been used as a tool of agency in coming-of-age novels, too, with countless young runaways and rebels populating fiction about adolescents. Sissy is not generally disobedient, but I could still use this in writing: The moment she says “No” to her mother and “Yes” to her best friend is a claim to agency—and one which has unintentionally tragic consequences.
In the chilling 2021 horror film The Innocents, set on a Norwegian housing estate, writer-director Eskil Vogt gives his cast of children agency quite literally; they have superpowers. The tension exists in the knowledge of what these children—armed with telekinesis and telepathy, and lacking any moral compass—might be capable of. In an otherwise social realist world, the power dynamics are subverted. Here, the adults can’t save the children. In my fiction, this cinematic tool helped too; during her mother’s bouts of depression, Sissy steps up as her caretaker despite her young age. She’s given the extra burden of keeping her mother’s illness a secret from school and prying parents, which, similarly, is an inversion of normative family power dynamics without departing from the real.
And then back to Beasts of the Southern Wild. The camera is exploratory and reactive to the world around it, zooming in on small details like the bugs on the leaves or the flicker of fireworks; we’re in Hushpuppy’s sensory world. Like using close third person in prose, this intimately connects us with our protagonist, but something else is at play too—Hushpuppy’s agency comes through her belief system. We see Hushpuppy learn about the climate crisis in the makeshift Bathtub school, and when she hits her father, she believes she has set the end of the world in motion. “I broke something,” she says. After that moment, the film operates on two levels; in the child’s world, Hushpuppy is on a mythical journey to find her Momma and put the world right; in the adult world, her father is dying, and their bayou community is soon to be displaced. The child world functions with its own logic that we, as viewers, are fully invested in. We want Hushpuppy to succeed, not because we believe her actions will save the bayou and her dad, but because we don’t want her to think that it’s her fault when everything falls apart.
Certainly, in writing Amphibian I worked to find both Sissy’s voice and her lens—just like harnessing the right camera angle—packing the prose full of observed details from a twelve-year-old’s point of view as she learns the social hierarchy of her new school and preteen world. But most of all, what Beasts of the Southern Wild showed me—indeed, all three of these films—is the importance of creating a twinned story arc, an interwoven adult narrative witnessed through the child’s point of view.
Like so many girls, Sissy turns to superstition and ritual to make sense of a world she doesn’t yet understand; she casts spells, makes wishes, and believes she’s part of a grand mythic narrative in which she has some control. Part of the heartbreak of the story, I hope, is that while readers invest in this narrative, they also fear it can’t save her.
Tyler Wetherall is the author of Amphibian (Ig Publishing, 2024) and No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run (St. Martin’s Press, 2018). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, British Vogue, and Condé Nast Traveler, and elsewhere. She is also the creator of the New York City book events newsletter Reading the City. Find Tyler on Instagram, @TylerWrites.
image credit: Joel Fulgencio