When do I tell the audience the age of my characters?

Devil's advocate here...put it in the blurb. That way the readers already know before they read it and you don't need to ever state it in the story itself.

 

You can gain this knowledge by how they act and perceive the world around them. The only time I told a characters age was when I wrote a character that had autism.

 

Honestly, I'm a bit baffled why not sharing the age is something an author would want to do.

 

I actually thought that after I left. Maybe because then you're telling obvious information, but I'm not that good at guessing ages and sometimes people act younger or older than their age.

 

I assumed it wasn't a matter of keeping it a secret, but avoiding a listing-of-facts tone that would distract the reader from the story.

 

oh no...

 

There's nothing wrong with telling the reader the age of your character. If the reader should know it, then tell!

It's only an issue because it's usually done in a clumsy fashion. You just stick the sentence "Billy was ten years old" in there somewhere, apropos of nothing. But it's usually easy to find a place to put that information. For example, you could have a scene in which Billy and his dad are going into the woods to cut firewood. "Dad, I want to use the chainsaw this time!" "No, Billy, you're not going to use the chain saw." "Why not?" "Because it's a heavy, dangerous piece of equipment and I don't trust a ten-year-old to be able to handle it safely. In a couple of years, after you've grown up a bit more, I'll let you use the chain saw."

That's not perfect, but the information is naturally presented in that situation. It's not that the reader isn't allowed, for some reason, to know the age of your characters. It's about finding a way to feed that information to the reader in a way that doesn't look like you're just shoehorning it in there willy-nilly.

 

When do you tell your audience?

When they need to know.

 

Birthdays are big with kids. They look forward to them or remember them. That's an in. Also, school is a big deal. Everyone's always asking kids what grade they are in. A lot of childhood revolves around school, so that's another in. You slip in relevant information as it comes up naturally in the course of events and dialog. Its helpful to do so toward the beginning of the story to provide the reader with a reference point.

 

Not necessarily - it's just one of those overly precise details that won't necessarily add much to the story. That and it is usually pretty clumsily done.
In the end, it is more a matter of personal preference, but from experience, it does not add as much information about a character as you might think - so taking the time to fit in this information in such a way that it does not feel forced or clunky is often just unnecessary.
Personally, I prefer to live by the rule that storeys should engage primarily in the necessary information to guide the reader through your character's world. At least until they don't or until your main POV is someone with autism or a particularly strange way of looking at the world.

There are ways it could be done and certain situations where it may be relevant. But ask yourself this, how often does it really matter to a story if your character is five or six, or twelve or thirteen, or more to the point 30 or 40. The simple truth is that it just doesn't. But if you are going to drop that information directly at some point, you need to make sure that whatever number you put matches up to the person you have described or it can be a jarring reading experience.

 

Best answer yet

 

Unless the story requires that the reader know, why ever tell them? My current WIP is half way through the second book and I don't think I've ever said, nor do I have any reason to.

 

Okay I understand now. That makes perfect sense thankyou for the informative reply! That was very helpful

 

One thing to keep in mind is that readers are blind until we enable them to see exactly what we intend them to. If we don't help them by providing essential facts and imagery, they are then strapped with the responsibility of making up their own. Once a reader makes up his own imagery, then that imagery might clash with the one we reveal later on in the story.

For example, the reader might imagine it nighttime when we suddenly reveal it is daytime a few pages removed from the intro. Or the reader might imagine a bunch of white kids when somwhere down the line we start telling them that they are East Asians. Or the reader might imagine the action taking place during Spring when pages removed from the intro we reveal it is the dead of winter and during a snowstorm.

That means that the reader has to dissassemble the whole world he created and gradually replace it with yours. Each replacement is a shock and a distraction and a dissapointment. It also reveals to the reader that we don't know our craft. So it is best to orient the reader properly early on in the story in order to avoid forcing him to fumble around creating his own world.