“No Nights (or Chapters) Off.” And Other Grown Up Lessons From Reading to My Kids

There has been one single experience that taught me more about storytelling than anything else in my life: telling bedtime stories to my children. Live audiences can be merciless; ask any comedian. Workshopping fiction can be rough, too. But I’d submit that while your own children won’t heckle you or carve up your prose with a snarky comment in the margin, they just may give you the most unvarnished feedback of all. Kids aged four to ten don’t have any agenda. They’re not competing with you, nor are they distracted. They’re just sitting right in front of you, all yours to entertain… or not. They don’t know how to pretend to like something, either. If they’re not pleased, you will know. I should note that telling these bedtime stories was often excruciating for me. Story time happened around 9 PM, after a full day of work and driving my kids all over town to various events and practices. I’m a morning person, and I can assure you there was often an almost physical pain in dragging myself up off the couch to be creative in front of four expecting faces, late on a weekday night. When writing a novel, I try to think of every chapter as like one night’s performance. Sometimes I made up a story on the spot out of whole cloth. Other times, we used prompts. Here was a typical one: each child would provide an element. Main Character? Spiderman . Place? School . Activity? Making brownies. Enemy? Sponge Bob Square Pants. From those disparate elements, I’d have to weave together a dynamic yarn of six or seven minutes, complete with an inciting incident, a climax and, on a good night, some moral to tie it all together, or even better, a cliffhanger to lead into the next night’s story. If the story was going well, I’d see them watching me, happy and engaged. Sometimes they’d raise their hand with a question. But if I was bombing, hoo boy, I could just feel it. They’d fall asleep. They’d look away. Worst of all was the shame: […]

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