Where ideas come from: 12 questions to ask your child

The blank page is a grown-up problem. Spend ten minutes in the back seat with a six-year-old and you’ll hear about a shark that runs a bakery, a cloud that got lost, and a plan to live inside the dishwasher. The ideas are all there. They just go quiet the moment someone sits down with a pencil and asks, “So, what do you want the story to be about?”

That question is too big. It’s like asking someone to describe the ocean. These twelve are small, which is exactly why they work. They run from easy to brave: the first ones get answered before your child notices they’re being asked, and the last ones hand you the heart of the story.

Ask them anywhere. The bath, the car, the walk home from school, the three minutes before lights out. Curiosity answers best when it thinks it’s playing.

To warm up

1. If you could have an animal that talked, which one would it be, and what would it say when it woke up?
2. What do you think your toys do when we’re not home?
3. If you found a door in a tree, what would be on the other side?
4. What food would be the best in the world, if it existed?

To find the problem of the story

1. What’s something that scares you a little but you also kind of want to do?
2. What’s the hardest part about being the age you are?
3. If you could fix one thing that happened this week, what would it be?
4. What do you do when something doesn’t work the first time?

For the characters

1. Who would you take with you if the trip were very, very long?
2. If one of your friends were an animal, which animal, and why?
3. What would someone be like if the opposite of your life happened to them?
4. Who would you want waiting for you at the end of the road?

What to do with the answers

Write them down exactly. The made-up words, the wobbly grammar, the name they gave the neighbor’s dog. Those are the fingerprints that let your child recognize the story as theirs, years from now. Tidy them into grown-up language and you lose the only part that mattered.

Look closely at questions 5, 6 and 7. The story is usually hiding there. “I’m scared when the light goes off but I like seeing the stars” is already a whole book: someone who goes outside at night, a little frightened, and looks up.

One idea, one story. If eight ideas came tumbling out, keep seven in a jar for later. Putting everything into one story is the fastest way to make none of it work, and the jar will come in handy on the next rainy Saturday.

Let the dragon eat clouds. If they say the dragon eats clouds, the dragon eats clouds. A children’s story is believable because of its feelings: the fear has to be real fear, the joy real joy. The facts can be as strange as the storyteller likes.

A word about the difficult answers

Sometimes question 6 or 7 opens a door to something that hurts: a new school, a grandmother who isn’t here anymore, a new baby who takes up all the attention.

If that happens, there’s a good story in it, and it gets written gently. The character can live through the same thing without the story explaining it or fixing it all at once. Stories keep us company while things get solved, which is its own kind of help. And if your child would rather not talk about it today, you change the question and keep playing. The door will still be there.

Next step

Two or three good answers are enough to build the outline. The eight-scene template is all you need to get from loose ideas to something you can read aloud tonight. To see how those scenes fit inside a finished book, read the parts of a story, explained with an actual story.