Five Years Old Is Not Too Small for a Big Adventure
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When you are five, the grown-ups are taller, the rules have usually been made by somebody else, and there are quite a few things you are apparently supposed to wait until you're older to understand.
That does not necessarily mean you have nothing useful to contribute.
It also does not mean you will wait.
Especially if a dragon egg is involved.
One of the things I enjoy about writing Tupi is remembering that being young and being capable are not opposites.
She can be brave without knowing everything. She can care deeply about something without having the words to explain every part of it. And she can find herself carrying a responsibility much bigger than anyone might expect from looking at her.
That doesn't make her a miniature grown-up.
She is still five.
I don't want to lose that part of her just because her world asks difficult things of her.
There is a difference between giving a young character an adventure and forgetting she is young once the adventure begins.
Children have their own priorities. Something an adult considers a small detail may matter enormously to them. They notice things, make connections, ask inconvenient questions, and sometimes accept the extraordinary more readily than the people who have spent years deciding what is possible.
A dragon?
Well, apparently there is a dragon.
Now there are other questions to answer.
That willingness to meet the world as it appears is something I love about writing young characters.
Tupi's world is not our everyday world. Her story takes place on Dragon World, roughly three thousand years before Sophia's modern-day childhood on Earth. But the feelings beneath the fantasy can still be familiar.
Wanting to help.
Wanting to be taken seriously.
Caring about someone and not being entirely sure what to do next.
You do not need to have lived on Dragon World to understand those things.
And you certainly do not need to be five.
As I work on different parts of this connected universe, I keep returning to the question of what belongs to each character's experience.
What would she notice?
What would she worry about?
What would matter to her before anyone else thought to ask?
The answer should not always be the thing a grown-up would choose.
That is part of letting Tupi be herself.
Her courage matters because things can be difficult for her, not because she is too remarkable to find anything difficult.
And being little does not make her affection, her questions, or her choices little.
Sometimes a very big story begins with somebody the rest of the world might underestimate.
And sometimes that somebody has found a red dragon egg.
You can meet Tupi in Tupi and the Red Dragon Egg, part of the Dragon Academy adventures, written under my Lynn Beechinor name.
A great deal awaits her.
Being five is only the beginning.