Category: How to make a story

Guides for writing a story at home: the template, the questions and real examples.

The parts of a story, explained with an actual story

Beginning, middle and end. Most of us learned it in second grade, wrote it on a worksheet, and forgot it by the weekend. Three words with nothing inside them. They only come alive when you watch them move through a real story, one page at a time.

So let’s walk through one. It’s a book we’re making at Idunn: a girl sets off through the forest on her way to a party, and along the path she meets animals, each one carrying a problem of their own. Follow her, and the parts of a story will show up on their own, right where they belong.

The beginning is an ordinary day

The beginning is there so you can meet someone before anything happens to them. Any morning will do: sun through the window, breakfast on the table, the smell of pine coming in from outside.

It can feel like wasted time. It’s the opposite. If you never saw what her ordinary day looked like, you wouldn’t notice the moment it broke.

Two pages are enough. Three, if your character has something very much their own to show off.

The middle starts when something moves in the branches

You don’t need a dragon. You need something that pulls your main character out of their routine: a noise, a door left open, a letter, a pair of eyes peering out from the leaves.

Stories written in a hurry tend to forget one thing: the problem has to cost them something. In ours, the girl feels a nervous tingle in her stomach before she steps closer, and she steps closer anyway. That tingle is the story. Take it out, and things merely happen.

The encounters: every character brings their own difficulty

The longest stretch of the book is usually a string of encounters. It works when each character carries a problem the listener recognizes from real life:

A sloth who is late for everything, because he’s slow.
A capybara who can’t say no, and ends up exhausted.
A monkey whose impatience makes every wait unbearable.
A toucan who’s afraid to fly high.

Nobody gets cured. The sloth is still slow on the last page. What changes is what each of them does with it, and that is what the child takes home. It’s also where the curiosity lives: every new animal is a new question about how people work.

The calm scene almost nobody writes

Just before the ending, it helps to have a page where nothing happens at all: looking up at the sky, floating on the water, sitting on a log. It does two jobs. It slows the heartbeat of a listener who’s already getting sleepy, and it makes whatever comes next land harder.

In this house’s stories that moment is always there. In one of them the character feels like “part of the waves that mix the depth of the sea with the glimmer of the stars.” It moves the plot exactly nowhere, and it holds the whole story up.

The ending is the way home

The end of a children’s story is rarely a victory. It’s a return, back to the house from the first page. The house is the same; whoever walks back in has changed a little.

And the last pages dim the lights. In ours, the girl falls asleep, and the final spread has no text at all: just the cabin in the dark under a sky full of stars. Going quiet is one of the oldest bedtime tricks there is, and it works just as well at the end of a school day as at the end of the night.

What about the moral?

The moral is the part you can delete. If the story already showed that everyone moves at their own speed, adding “and so she learned that everyone moves at their own speed” takes something away: the listener had already worked it out, and now you’ve said it for them.

Leave the ending open, with the house dark. If someone wants to say the lesson out loud, let it be the child.

To take with you

Part	Pages	What it’s for
Beginning	2 or 3	Meeting them before anything happens
The routine breaks	1	Getting them out of the house
Encounters	6 to 8	One recognizable difficulty per character
Calm	1	Slowing the pulse before the end
Ending	2	Going home, quietly

Now that you’ve seen the parts in motion, try building your own. Start with the full guide, with the eight-scene template, and borrow twelve questions to ask your child so the ideas come from them.

September 17, 2026

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.
September 17, 2026

How to write a story where your child is the one who lives it

It usually starts one of two ways. The first is a Tuesday night: someone who is five asks for “a new one,” and you have already read every book in the house, twice, with voices. The second is a birthday coming up, and the wish to give something that will still be on the shelf when the toys are gone. Both roads end at the same kitchen table, with a blank page, and that is usually when the sentence arrives: “but I can’t write.”

As it happens, the hardest part of this story is already done. You know the person who is going to live it: how they laugh, what they’re afraid of, what they say when they wake up. Everything else is craft, and craft can be learned in an afternoon.

Where do you start, if you’re not a writer?

With something that actually happens to your child. Maybe they’re shy about asking for help. Maybe they get furious when they lose at cards, or can’t fall asleep alone, or run out of patience with a little brother by four in the afternoon.

That difficulty is the engine of the story. The story keeps it company. In the stories that work, nobody takes away what the character struggles with; they learn to carry it, and they come home a little taller.

Take one we’re working on at Idunn. A sloth who is very, very slow, and late for absolutely everything. By the end of the book he is exactly as slow as on page one. What changes is that he discovers that everyone moves at their own speed, and that the forest has room for his. Children who have heard “hurry up” forty times that day tend to sit very still for that page.

The template: eight scenes, nothing more

Eight scenes fit into one afternoon and hold up a whole story. Write each one on its own slip of paper, so you can shuffle them around the table until the order feels right.

Scene	What happens
1	What an ordinary day looks like for your main character
2	Something breaks the routine: a sound, a letter, an animal
3	The difficulty you already know about shows up
4	An encounter: someone else with a different problem
5	They try something together, and it goes wrong
6	A calm moment, almost without action
7	They try again, and this time something happens
8	The way home, quiet

If a scene won’t come, skip it and keep going. A gap is much easier to fill once the scenes around it exist. And if you’d like to watch these pieces working inside a real story first, the parts of a story, explained with an actual story walks through one scene by scene.

What do I ask so the ideas come out?

The best ideas are rarely invented at the table. They’re drawn out of your child in the bath, in the car, on the walk to school, while they have no idea they’re co-writing a book. Three questions that almost always open the door:

If you could have an animal that talked, which one would it be, and what would it say when it woke up?
What’s something that scares you a little but you also kind of want to do?
If you found a door in a tree, what would be on the other side?

Write the answers down exactly as they say them, odd words and all. Those words are the fingerprints: they’re how your child will know, years from now, that the story was theirs. When these three wear out, there are twelve more questions waiting.

And if I don’t know how it ends?

Almost nobody does when they start. Two rules are enough to get you home.

The ending slows down. The last stretch is going home, and home is quiet: dinner, bath, bed, lights out. If the story is read at night, the words should dim along with the house. In the one we’re making, the final spread has no words at all, just a small cabin in the dark under a sky full of stars.

Let the story teach the lesson. If it already showed that asking for help didn’t hurt, there’s no need to add “and so she learned to ask for help.” The person listening understood it. And what a child works out alone, they keep.

How do I make it sound right out loud?

A children’s story is finished by reading it aloud, ideally to the person it’s for. That’s where you hear what the page hides:

If you run out of breath, the sentence is too long. Split it.
Repetition is part of the music (“and he walked, and he walked, and he walked”). Young listeners wait for it.
Short dialogue brings it to life. Plain verbs work best: said, asked, yawned.
Leave out slashes and brackets: nobody can read them aloud.

How many pages, how many words?

A guide to lean on, with room to break it:

Ages 4 to 6: 14 to 16 spreads, 20 to 40 words per page.
Ages 7 to 9: up to 24 pages, short paragraphs.
Ages 10 to 12: short chapters, and they can follow two threads at once.

And if I can’t draw?

Then the pictures can come from somewhere else. Three ways that work: photographs of objects (a teddy bear, a front door, a bowl of cereal), magazine cut-outs, or handing the drawing to your child and writing around whatever they make. That last one is often the best book in the house.

The first personalized stories that came out of this house, back in 2004, were made exactly that way: printed pages, scissors, glue and a spiral binding. None of them was perfect. That turned out to be part of their charm.

Once it’s written

Test it. Read it once with someone else’s name and see if it still stands up; if it only works with your child’s name, even better. Then keep the draft, crossed-out words and all. In ten years that crumpled paper will be worth more than anything anyone could print.

And if what you’d love is the story written, illustrated and bound for you, with the name, the family and the way your child moves through the world woven into the text, that’s what we’re making at Idunn right now: personalized books, made by hand, where you can ask us to let you know when they’re ready. Yours and ours can live on the same shelf. Start with yours tonight.