My daughter is about a month shy of two and a half. She’s been telling stories and making up songs since she learned to speak but it’s reached a sort of apex recently. One of her favorite things to do is to pick up a random big book or page of a lot of text, such as the phone book, the supermarket circular, or whatever I’m currently trying to read, and pretend to read it herself. She runs her fingers along the text and uses this slow, breathy storytelling voice (that is probably her version of what I sound like when I read) and tells us these epic stories that can sometimes last 20 minutes or more about anything and everything.
We read to her a lot but I think the real reason she’s so into playing at stories is the fact that my husband and I have been making up stories and songs for her since she was born. It’s been normalized to the point where I think she doesn’t realize everyone doesn’t just walk around randomly bursting into song and spinning yarns. One of the elements we also encouraged from the start was being an active participant in these stories. She’ll often tell us the kind of story she wants, throw plot twists in mid-story that we have to incorporate or even start the story and we have to finish it. These are often alternate versions of fairy tales such as the one she asked for the other day which was a variant of The Princess and the Pea where the Princess made pea soup with only a single grain of pepper in it and only a true Prince would think it was too spicy or Goofy-rella where Donald was the fairy god duck and would do magic by throwing pepper in the air and sneezing. (She is obsessed with pepper and sneezing so nearly all of the stories feature these in some way.)
She’s also started dictating stories that we have to write down for her, reading each line back as we go. They’re slices of insanity from the mind of a two year old, mind you, but they are decidedly story-shaped ramblings. We were doing one of these epic four page stories yesterday and she had me writing the story in crayon while leaning against the window sill (for some reason I’m forbidden from using a real pen and, oh, the hand cramps) and there were a couple of lines where every time I read them back to her she’d just look out the window and do this small smile to herself like, “That’s a good line.” It reminded me so much of me watching my own plays that Mama was definitely having a moment. (To add to the poignancy, I realized later the scrap paper we were writing on the back of was the first draft of Wife Novel. Her first stories were going on the back of my first novel. Doesn’t get more symbolic than that, really!)
As you can imagine, not only do I love how creative she is from a general parenting standpoint, this is all very good for me as a writer. I’ve found that, though I have less time to write overall, because I’m in this constant state of storytelling give and take, I can make more of the time I do have because I’m already in the mindset. It often feels like I’m in some kind of creativity masterclass because she sees things from such a different perspective than I do as an adult. It’s one thing to say that the secret to good writing is to remember that there are no rules but quite another to regularly hang out with someone who doesn’t know the rules yet and breaks them effortlessly in ways I couldn’t even dream of doing. It’s been incredibly beneficial to have this constant reminder that so much of what is desirable as an artist is simply remembering the way you played as a child and letting go of the hang-ups you’ve collected on the way to adulthood.
It’s no coincidence that my word count output has increased proportional to her tale mania. Her love of words makes me want to write her All The Stories. And while I always thought it would be me teaching her how to be creative, I’m discovering it’s actually the other way around.
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
