Tell Me A Story, Daddy! |

By Nick Hayden
November 11, 2016

We here at Children of the Wells began this project because we’re storytellers and we thought it would be fun to tell a longer, interconnected story together. We’ve sometimes stalled along the way, partly because, since we are storytellers, we each have other individual stories we’re also working on. (Excuses, excuses, I know.)

There’s a thing about being a storyteller that, for me, starts to make each project a drawn-out affair. I’ve gotten more and more concerned on writing well, on making things interesting, in editing completely, in somehow making the tenuous web that is fiction hang together. And this is very good. But it is sometimes paralyzing. So, now and then, it’s freeing to just throw the rules of well-structured fiction out the window and do things crazy and off-the-cuff.

Exhibit A is a live brainstorm my podcast partner-in-crime Timothy Deal and I did in the second half of Episode 70 of our podcast on storytelling.

But, more personally, it happens with my daughter Serenity. Her new favorite thing (though the Shopkins voices are still active) is for me to tell her a story. Usually, it needs to involve at least one Minion, since Despicable Me 2 is her current watch-it-every-day movie. And whenever I try to move toward an ending, she helpfully adds, “But there were still 200 problems in the world,” which is her way of adding conflict — because a hero’s job is never done.

The other day, as I had Wilbur the Minion solving one problem after another, I thought how fun it was to be completely ridiculous in storytelling. I mean, in one story, the sun had wandered off and Wilbur had to get it back, so he needed a magnet to attract the sun, and so first he had to gather lots of jalapenos (because they’re hot, you know, and you’re trying to attract the sun) and finally the sun came back. The end.

“But there are still 200 problems in the world,” she reminds me.

When it’s just you and a child eager to see her favorite character do things, foreshadowing, set-up, and payoff don’t matter, just the adventure and whatever cool you can pull out. (Which, I suppose, is true of some TV and movies, but never mind that.)

There’s a delightful playfulness about embarking on a quest for a banana or discovering Neptunian penguins or even just having Minions make robot clones of themselves because they’re tired of working. Between these recent stories and the many, many made-up bedtime songs (a series which include hordes of baby tigers whose number grew by five every night because my son thought it hilarious to have them run amok), I’ve certainly created my share of off-kilter, nonsensical and (apparently) delightful stories.

If there’s anything to learn here, it’s this: there is joy in any act of creation, and we are wired to play. Certainly, as a writer, I try to create with excellence and skill, but at the heart of all our novels and comics and multi-million dollar movies is the simple pleasure of gazing at the clouds to see what shapes we can find.

A person who can only see planets as hunks of rock and bananas as a source of potassium and Minions as bizarre little yellow Pez with eyes, a person who can’t see between and beyond the laws and atoms of the world, is a person who has ceased to be a child; and it is children who grow into complete humans.