I'm a fairly new writer, and I've been thinking about a story. It'll be based around a pair of characters, both children. One's around twelve and the other sixteen. The latter was recently adopted into the former's family. The two were just getting to know each other. To make everything more interesting, I've decided that the twelve year old would be especially violent and cruel while the sixteen year old would be pacifistic. Basically, it'll go like a standard fantasy story. They'll go to some fantasy themed place and try to find their way home. But everything will be figurative-you can't really decide if their adventure actually happened or if it was just something made up by a child's imagination. I might also play around with the story a bit and make it slightly darker, with things like depression. What are some ways I can make the interaction between these two characters believable while developing their relationship? And what are some things to avoid while writing this?
Eesh. My first thought here is 'With difficulty'. Not because you can't make the characters interesting, simply that this is stuff that has been done a lot. My take would be to have the younger kid be 'right'. It's not a story about violence being wrong and him having to learn to calm down and act like a grown up; it's about this older kid who has these principles that he's never had tested finding out that the 'adult' world is a much greyer one than he expected and sometimes you need to be violent just to survive. Sometimes you need to kill someone to make sure they never come back. The end point would probably be him figuring out moderation here; that you can't just be cruel and violent but you need to be willing at least to defend yourself. Playing with the morality of cruelty in this way I think gives you lots of interesting conflicts to touch on.
