I’m currently working on a novel and am using dual timelines – one for my protagonist as an adult, the other from a child’s viewpoint. At the start of the novel, the child is eight years old. I’m writing in first person point of view, and I want the language I use for these chapters to be both believable and realistic for a child of that age.

In researching how to write as an eight-year-old, here are a few tips I gathered, which I hope you may find useful too. If you have any others, I’d love...