My problem is I have a short story due in a week or so for my class and I have limited writing room (about 5-7 pages) which is difficult for me. My character is a princess in a magical land (cliche I know but work with me here) who decides to seek out an old god/outcast* in order to solve a problem, her father is planning to overthrow the gods (he's sick of their petty squabbles leading to disasters and death.) She doesn't know how he plans on doing this, so she goes to the old god, who she has been warned about thousands of times because he's manipulative and untrustworthy, and fully expects it to work out for her, which it obviously doesn't. The character is immature, but not maliciously. She's used to defeating her opponents and being the smartest in her class, but it's like gifted kids once they're out in the real world, life isn't something being good at algebra can solve. Her whole character is going to be framed in this one conversation with the old god, it's all I have room for really, but how do I do this convincingly? How do I portray this via a single conversation without it feeling like I'm hitting the reader over the head with it? *He quit being a god because his siblings are idiots, he's more like a demon who makes deals with people in exchange for something, usually magic.
I would engineer the conversation to include a subject which will expose her naivety to how the real world works. It need not take over the whole conversation, but just be enough for the reader to think "Jesus...This kid isn't living in the real world." It's quite hard to know what this snippet of conversation should be without knowing much about your setting. Can you tell me more about your magical land? Is there much crime? What would the risks and dangers be for somebody who is immature if they ventured out into it alone?
Is the princess able to use any magic or artifacts that she believes will help her in her conversation with the old god? Something she believes is so powerful that she places all her trust in it to perform some action during the talk but the god just brushes it off - "oh, how cute..."
Immature people tend to blame their problems on others rather than take responsibility for their own choices and actions. I think if they have some advantage like being smart, they'll often become arrogant and believe it makes them superior to other people who aren't as smart, and will be unwilling to see that less intelligent people can often solve problems just as well (or better) using different means. So they overvalue their intelligence and 'put all their eggs in one basket'. Solving the problems of life involves many factors besides intelligence, such as empathizing with other people, knowing how to talk to them to gain their empathy etc. Many highly intelligent people tend to be cynical, not to have many friends (or any), and to be unhappy in general. Often they're good with numbers and data, but not good with people. I'm just throwing out some angles you could use. As others have said, we'd need some more information to give any advice on how to frame the conversation.
Ah ok, it's like a 'deal with the devil' or the tales of a genie in a bottle, you can make wishes but they get manipulated, so wording becomes vitally important (and still the wishes tend to be answered in unintended ways). In that case I would have the old god capable of seeing right into her weaknesses and gloating about it. As if he can see right into her soul, and being arrogant and narcissistic himself (as is the nature of devils and genies) he likes to ferret out people's weak points (it's how he manipulates them) and insinuate to their faces that he knows what they are, not directly but in slightly disguised manner. Maybe she believes her intelligence will allow her to 'solve the riddle of the Sphinx' so to speak. He could even tell her that many have believed this before, but that intelligence alone is not enough, that people need to learn humility and to value and cherish attributes of others even if they're quite different from yourself. He might even imply that he and she are very much alike, in that they devalue love and relationship but put too much emphasis on pure mentality, as if he's the pure archetype of her own faults magnified to gigantic proportions.
