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A First (or Two)
So as the subject of my first-ever blog post, I thought I would take Isabella’s (that’s my 2 year old daughter) first-ever story–it just seemed appropriate somehow.
The other day Isabella and I were riding in the car, and she suddenly launched into an elaborate (well, for a two year old) and totally original story about a hungry tiger. We read to her a good bit, and she loves her books, but this was the first time she’d ever made up a story of her own. Or rather, one that didn’t involve props or toys. She’ll often make up little scenarios about her dolls or toy animals and enlist me in acting them out. But this was different–this was just an unadorned story. Just the words.
Anyway, here’s an approximate transcription: There’s a tiger and he’s hungry. He wants some cake, so he goes into his house. He sits in his high chair. But then he gets grumpy, so he has to take some Tylenol and go to bed with a blanket and a sheet.
Aren’t you smiling? I mean, how can that fail to brighten your day? But I do have a point, here, beyond that my girl is a cutie. I mean, she is, of course. But two things about the whole episode struck me as interesting: first, that it would occur to her to pass the time on a boring car ride without any books to read by inventing a story of her own. And second, I was struck by the structure of her story–by how much she was already able to use the basic plot elements you learn about in school. Or, if you happen to be a writer, think about every day.
She had the initial problem: the tiger is hungry for cake. The quest/search: he goes into his house and sits in his high chair. The climactic conflict: he gets grumpy. And then the resolution: he takes some Tylenol and goes to bed.
I remember learning in a college class about how children’s brains are hard-wired to learn language. To absorb all the phonemes they hear in the world around them, and begin to be able to string them together, first into words, then sentences, of their own.
But what I started wondering, listening to Isabella, was whether we as humans are in some way hard-wired for narrative, as well. Whether the structural elements common to nearly all narratives were not so much invented as evolved organically because they simply felt right. And more than that, whether we have some inborn deep-rooted instinct to create stories that make sense of the world around us. Stories that mirror our own lives back at us, teach us how to solve our problems and conquer our fears.
As a writer, I’d certainly like to think so.
This entry was posted Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 20th, 2011 at 5:57 pm
[...] little backstory–way back before Twilight of Avalon was even published, I wrote my very first blog post EVER about Bella’s first story ever. I mean, the first original story she made up on her own. [...]