Telling make-believe stories to your children

Telling Make-Believe Stories To Your Children

I might as well tell you right off: I'm not a professional storyteller. The wisdom I share has been drawn from my experience telling stories to my children--a small, faithful, and captive audience. Nor am I talking about how to tell other people's stories. What I am concerned about is telling stories you make up yourself, with all the rough edges and approximately square corners that characterize many do-it-yourself projects and with the same potential for feelings of satisfaction and self-sufficiency.

If you already tell stories to your children, even stories you have heard elsewhere, you already know that there are certain times when it is the appropriate thing to do. A young child who may be cranky during a long car ride or itchy after a long wait welcomes a good story. In public situations--restaurants or doctors' offices--where more elaborate forms of entertainment seem awkward, storytelling may be the only alternative. And then there is the classic storytelling situation--around a campfire on a summer night. Telling your own stories draws the family together and creates vivid "snapshot" memories and special family mythologies.

Setting Forth Plotless

The key to this kind of storytelling is that you do not need to know how the story is going to end when you start it. The feeling that you need a worked-out story to begin is the greatest deterrent to parental storytelling. In fact, you do not need a plot at all. We tend to equate stories with their plot lines, but often we respond as much to ongoing situations as to completed events.

Begin your story by setting a scene and developing characters. Some variation on the current setting is often effective, such as "Our story begins in a restaurant many years ago, before all the 700-pound rabbits had been driven out of the land. In those days everyone got nervous when a cloud passed in front of the sun." Let the details accumulate. In my stories, what happens grows out of setting and character. I simply gather details until I have several next steps to choose from, and then I pick one.

A word about details. Children enjoy being able to find themselves in the main characters, but this is different from actually being the main character. If the room you describe is exactly like your child's room, your child may feel a bit cheated. If, on the other hand, your daughter would really like to have a canopy bed and if the heroine has one, your child will probably find this detail quite satisfying. I give my characters names similar, but not identical, to our children's names--Amelia instead of Emily, for example. Up until the age of four, children seem to like characters having the same name as theirs; however, when you name the character after your child, you must be careful about what happens to the character.

Older children, on the other hand, appreciate the ambiguity of the "almost" name that allows them to identify with or back off from the character as the story develops. The "approximateness" between the children and the characters adds an interesting undertone: children sense the identification but cannot be sure it is intended when it is not made explicit. This touch encourages wonder.

When I first started telling my children stories, I was surprised by their interest in details. When I used few details, I was treated to many questions designed to fill in the blanks I did not know I was leaving. Even adding the details, I found that my audience wanted to participate.

A traditional storyteller's device is to ask the audience questions directly: "And what do you think was in there?" Sometimes I do ask questions directly, but because I do not start off with an ironclad plot, I am more easily able to respond to the children's umprompted suggestions. As with the names and descriptions, I try not to use their suggestions exactly, since it seems important to preserve the tacit agreement that the characters have an existence separate from ours.

Another advantage in setting forth plotless is that the stories do not get preachy. Nothing is duller than an obvious lesson thickly decorated with plot. If you develop your story with sufficient detail and if there is a lesson to be learned, then it will grow out of the story, under its own power.

The reluctant storyteller who resists taking a blind leap without some definite series of events to draw on may safely delve into biography. Your own life, particularly your childhood, is a rich source of good stories. What's more, your interest in recalling and recounting the details of personal experiences enables you to avoid merely "listing the events" or struggling to "make it through the plot." A rendition that springs from a life experience can draw its audience far into the story.

Building the Story As You Go

An intriguing story line tends to emerge from the setting and characterization. If a plot does not immediately come to mind, try a quest. Take your well-developed characters in their well-developed setting, and send them off in search of something. The search, unlike the hunt or the battle, can avoid much needless violence. Violence is, after all, a cheap shot at gaining attention from children. Although it is more difficult to resolve conflict in stories without the use of violence, a storyteller can uncover some interesting personal attitudes and set forth some new solutions by developing a more subtle motif.

A word of advice about plots: Do not be afraid of repetition. Recurring characters, plots, and situations are engaging. Our daughter Clare and I went through a spate of reading Andrew Lang's Fairy Books, a collection of folktales in a variety of colors, and she thoroughly enjoyed spotting all the patterns of three. A king with daughters always had three, and the third was the one who did the right thing; or the third son saved the princess; or the third try was the successful one. Being a third child, Clare appreciated the "threeness," but she also derived obvious comfort from finding the familiar in the midst of the new. Children are not put off by patterns, as long as the old is blended with the new. The trick is to tell a new story with some familiar elements, rather than a worn-out story with new trim.

When all else fails, try stringing together a continuing saga: "The Continuing Adventures of...." The tough part about telling ongoing adventure stories is the need to remember past events and details to avoid the most dreadful trap of all--inconsistency. The larger your audience, the tougher this is. Although no child keeps track of every detail, every child keeps track of some, and a captive member of your audience is likely to chime in with, "But you said he didn't like to play with trucks!"

No matter how bizarre the world of your story is, try to keep it internally consistent. When caught in an inconsistency, concoct an explanation: "These trucks were enchanted to make him play with them. You could tell they were enchanted because the hubcaps glowed in the dark, only he didn't know it because it was not dark yet." Such side trips can add interest to a story and supply suggestive details worthy of further development.

The most exciting aspect of parental storytelling is that when we tell our own stories to our children, the quality of the story is less important than the quality of the experience itself. If you put some of yourself into the story and if your children see some of themselves in the story, then the story becomes a bond between parent and child, something that brothers and sisters can share, something that draws the family together. Telling your own stories does not guarantee that you will all live happily ever after, but it does offer the family temporary safety from goblins and trolls and 700-pound rabbits.

COPYRIGHT 1989 Mothering Magazine
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