Beginning, middle and end. That’s how it’s taught, and that’s how it’s forgotten, because they are three words with nothing inside them. They make far more sense when you watch them move through a real story, scene by scene.
We’ll use one we are preparing at Idunn: a girl goes exploring in the forest and, on her way to a party, meets animals who each have a problem of their own.
The beginning isn’t “once upon a time”: it’s an ordinary day
The beginning exists so that you meet someone before anything happens to them. Any morning: sun through the window, breakfast, the smell of the forest.
It looks like wasted time and it’s the opposite. If you don’t know what their ordinary day is like, you won’t notice what broke.
Two pages are enough. Three, if the character has something very much their own to show.
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, a letter, an animal peering out.
And here’s what’s usually missing in stories written in a hurry: the problem has to cost them something. In ours, the girl feels a nervous tingle before she goes closer, and goes closer anyway. That tingle is the story; without it, things merely happen.
The encounters: every character brings their own difficulty
The longest stretch is usually a series of encounters. It works when each character carries a problem you recognise:
- A sloth who is late for everything because he is slow.
- A capybara who can’t say no and ends up exhausted.
- A monkey whose impatience makes waiting unbearable.
- A toucan who is afraid to fly high.
None of them is cured. The sloth is still slow at the end. What changes is what they do with it, and that is what the listener takes home.
The calm scene almost nobody writes
Before the ending, it helps to have a scene where nothing happens: looking at the sky, floating, sitting down. It does two things. It slows the pulse of a listener who is already tired, and it makes what 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 doesn’t advance the plot. It holds the story up.
The ending is going home, not winning
The end of a children’s story is rarely a victory: it’s a return. Back to the house from the beginning — but whoever comes back isn’t quite who left.
And the close dims the light. In ours, the girl falls asleep and the final spread has no text at all: just the cabin in the dark under a starry sky. It’s a classic bedtime device — going quiet — and it works as well in bed as in a classroom.
What about the moral?
The moral is the part you can delete. If the story showed that everyone moves at their own speed, writing “and so she learned that everyone moves at their own speed” adds nothing: it takes it away from the listener, who had already worked it out.
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 recognisable difficulty per character |
| Calm | 1 | Slowing the pulse before the end |
| Ending | 2 | Going home, quietly |
If you want to write one at home, here’s the full guide with the eight-scene template and the questions you can ask your child so the ideas come from them.