From book time to story time

Last week our three-year-old daughter magically realized that stories--the same kind we’ve always read in books before bed--can also happen to her.

I don’t know how she figured it out--one night she simply said, “I want you to tell a story about me and Darci” [her same-age cousin]. And I struggled through it, as I knew I would, because even though I like writing, I choke with impromptu storytelling. I know a good story needs a few conflicts, shouldn’t have an overbearing moral, and ends with the protagonist having changed in some way.

“Once upon a time,” I began, “there were two little girls, Lexi and Darci. And they were jumping on a trampoline [we have a trampoline], and one time, Lexi jumped up so high that she almost touched a cloud, and she realized she could fly.”

It was a flat, vague, clichéd exposition, but the look on my daughter’s face, a foot away from mine, was wide-eyed suspense.

“What happened next, Daddy?” The same mystical source which prompted her to ask for a story about herself had also taught her the correct response to the parent who has stalled on ideas.

In that story, the conflict was that Lexi and Darci were flying around and going to be late for dinner. Over the next few nights I found myself struggling to come up with an antagonist who was interesting but not scary and a plot that also wasn’t scary and didn’t involve flying. My first five or so stories for and about my daughter all involved people or animals or cars being able to fly. I have no idea what that says about me.

What I knew I needed, I thought as I lay looking into my daughter’s rapt face, was a set of family myths. Some default stories, maybe modeled on the Grimm or Brer Rabbit tales, about people she loves and places she knows. And in that child-bedtime twilight, a silence broken only by her repeating the question, “What were their names, Daddy?” I imagined Greek parents, Egyptian parents, Mayan, Roman, Asian Indian, Chinese, Aboriginal parents, sleepily weaving a cosmogony and mythology as much for their desire to worship the ineffably grandiose above and all around them as to get the children at their sides to sleep.