Idunn Editorial

Tag: storytelling with kids

  • Where ideas come from: 12 questions to ask your child

    The blank page is a grown-up problem. A six-year-old has ideas to spare; what they don’t have is a reason to tell you any of them when you ask, “so what do you want the story to be about?”

    That question is too big. These twelve are small, which is why they work. They go from easy to committed: the first ones get answered without thinking, the last ones hand you the heart of the story.

    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 here?
    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 is 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 journey were very long?
    2. If a friend of yours 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. With the made-up words, the odd grammar, the name they gave the neighbour’s dog. That is what later makes them recognise the story as theirs. Translate it into grown-up language and you lose the only part that mattered.

    Look at questions 5, 6 and 7. The story is usually in there. “I’m scared when the light goes off but I like seeing the stars” is already a story: someone who goes out at night.

    One idea, one story. If eight came out, save seven. Putting everything into one story is the fastest way to make none of it work.

    Don’t correct as you go. If they say the dragon eats clouds, the dragon eats clouds. A children’s story isn’t believable because of its facts; it’s believable because of its feelings: the fear has to be real fear.

    One caution about the difficult answers

    Sometimes question 6 or 7 opens something that hurts: a new school, a grandmother who isn’t here any more, a new baby who took all the attention.

    If that happens, there’s a good story in it — but it’s written carefully: the character can live the same thing without the story explaining it or fixing it all at once. Stories don’t solve things; they keep you company while things get solved. And if your child would rather not talk about it, you change the question and move on.

    Next step

    Two or three answers are enough to build the outline. Here’s the eight-scene template, which is all you need to get from loose ideas to something you can read aloud.

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

    There is an evening when someone who is five asks for a story and you have already read every book in the house. There is also the other one: the gift you want to outlast a toy. Both end up in the same place — writing one — and that is usually where the sentence appears: “but I can’t write.”

    You don’t need to know how to write. You need to know the person who is going to live the story, and you already do.

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

    Not at the beginning. Start with something that actually happens to your child: they’re shy about asking for help, they get angry when they lose, they can’t fall asleep alone, they lose patience with a sibling.

    That difficulty is the engine of the story. Not to correct it — a story is not a telling-off in disguise — but to keep it company. In the stories that work, nobody takes away what the character struggles with: they learn to carry it.

    An example from a story we are working on at Idunn: a sloth who is very slow and is late for everything. Nobody makes him fast. What changes is that he discovers everyone moves at their own speed, and he is still slow.

    The template: eight scenes, nothing more

    Eight scenes fit into one afternoon and hold up a whole story. Write them on eight slips of paper you can move around.

    SceneWhat happens
    1What an ordinary day looks like for your main character
    2Something breaks the routine: a sound, a letter, an animal
    3The difficulty you already know about shows up
    4An encounter: someone else with a different problem
    5They try something together and it doesn’t work
    6A calm moment, almost without action
    7They try again, and this time something happens
    8The way home, quiet

    If a scene doesn’t come to you, skip it and move on. Filling a gap is easier than starting from nothing. And if you would rather see these pieces at work inside a real story, here are the parts of a story explained with an example, scene by scene.

    What do I ask so the ideas come out?

    The best ideas aren’t invented at the table: you draw them out of your child without them noticing they’re writing. Three that almost always work:

    • If you could have an animal that talked, which one would it be, and what would it say when it woke up?
    • What is 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 exactly as they say them, odd words and all. Those words are what later make them recognise the story as theirs. There are twelve more questions for when these three wear out.

    And if I don’t know how it ends?

    Almost nobody does when they start. Two rules are enough:

    The ending slows down. The last stretch is going home, not celebrating. Dinner, bed, lights out. If the story is read at night, the text should dim along with the house. In ours, the final spread has no words at all: just the cabin in the dark under the stars.

    Don’t explain the lesson. If the story already showed that asking for help doesn’t hurt, you don’t need to write “and so she learned to ask for help.” The person listening understood it, and if they got there alone, they keep it.

    How do I make it sound right out loud?

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

    • If you run out of breath, the sentence is too long. Split it.
    • Repetition isn’t a mistake; it’s the engine (“and he walked, and he walked, and he walked”).
    • Short dialogue brings it alive. Plain verbs: said, asked, yawned.
    • No slashes or brackets: they can’t be pronounced.

    How many pages, how many words?

    A guide, not a rule:

    • 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.

    And if I can’t draw?

    Don’t. Three things that work: photographs of objects (not of the child), magazine cut-outs, or let them illustrate it and you write around their drawings. For twenty years, in this house personalized stories were made exactly like that: slide, print, scissors, spiral binding. Dozens were given away, and not one of them was perfect.

    Once it’s written

    Test it. Read it with someone else’s name and see if it still works; if it only works with your child’s name, even better. Keep the draft: in ten years that crumpled paper will be worth more than anything we could print.

    And if you got this far and what you want is the story written, illustrated and bound without having to make it yourself, that is exactly what we are preparing at Idunn: stories where the name, the family and the way each child moves through the world belong in the text, not pasted on top. We’ll let you know when it’s ready — and in the meantime, write yours. It isn’t competing with ours.