Bedtime Story Writers Workshop

The feedback is ROUGH

Hey Y’all,

Every night I tell my kid, who’s 4 years old, two extemporaneous bedtime stories about Robot and Unicorn, a robot and unicorn respectively, who are either siblings or best friends, depending on what fits the narrative best. Sometimes the stories are not-at-all thinly veiled attempts to recap or process what happened that day and sometimes it’s something fantastical like they to go to an ice cream shop and get 100 scoops of ice cream. (She balks at anything truly fantastical, like Unicorn and Robot Go to the Moon. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

It is hard to come up with these stories. It is the last parenting task I have to do besides sitting in the dark looking at my phone until she falls asleep, and I have been making it harder on myself for no reason. But it’s also taught me something about audience and the reader, and I want to share that with you today.

First off, there is no book in Unicorn and Robot. I’ve seen a lot of queries for books that come out of bedtime stories but I will not be turning the hundreds of plots I’ve come up with (few repeats!!) into a picture book series. For one, a bedtime story is not a 32-page picture book. A spoken story does not have illustrations to aid in the storytelling. The requirements (uhhhhh, these days that’s anything that doesn’t produce screaming) are not the same. So while I am SURE there are plenty of published picture books that came out of bedtime stories, the journey between the two is much longer and full of edits than most realize.

I, however, have approached these bedtime stories with all the hubris my MFA has imbued me with. Of course I could tell a fantastic bedtime story, completely off the cuff, to enthrall and educate my kid. They would be interesting and magical and most of all, efficient. My kid’s goal is to keep me in her room as long as possible to delay sleep, and my goal is to stay there only as long as she needs to feel she is safe and loved, so I can get out of there and take an effing shower. These two things are at odds.

As I say the words “once upon a time there was a Unicorn and a Robot…” I’m thinking of a plot. What was our struggle that day? What are we doing that weekend I could prepare her for? What is she learning in school or struggling with on the playground? I usually come up with something and stack up the brief plot in my head like index cards and I’m 10% of the way in when she says:

No no no Mommy, not like that.

She’s got notes.

This makes me bristle, but I try to hide it. I have a plan for this story! I know what I am doing! My plan is going to cut 10 minutes off this bedtime routine!

She does not care about this plan.

I am, unfortunately, a bit of a know-it-all. I dig in my heels when I think I’m right and dammit I am right about this bedtime story. I WILL control this bedtime story!!!

This, uh, has lead to some bedtime tears and I’m not proud of it. So, I started asking her what should happen in the story. Sometimes she’s no help at all. Sometimes her plan is a not-at-all subtle way to get me to tell the longest story in history (“Mama, today they go on an alllllllll day long playdate!!”) and most of the time her ideas make little to no logical sense.

Still, even though I was asking for her input, I was trying to impose order on the story. I would think Well, they can’t really bake a cake themselves, so I have to work in the parents somehow. Or I doubt their parent would have all those craft supplies on hand, so I’ll change up the castle she wants them to build. I wanted the story to work within a set of narrative rules I basically made up so that I would know the bounds of the story to ease my exhausted brain.

Reader, this was dumb. I did not need to impose ANY logic on this story! It did not matter that Robot and Unicorn would never have enough cardboard boxes in their garage (even a garage!! they’re city Robots and Unicorns) to build a whole pretend town. This! Didn’t! Matter! I was being a bit of a control freak about this bedtime story, probably because I have so little control over most things day to day, and also I am a writer and skilled in this pursuit and dammit no one was going to tell me how to tell a bedtime story.

I realized at some point that my kid is my audience, the reader, if you will. She did not want the same things I wanted. And when I loosened up my rules and thought more about what she wanted, story time got much easier (if not always faster). And she was happier. She got to control the story more and I had to think a little less, and frankly, it mattered not a single bit that the logic of the story she wanted me to tell made no sense, was disjointed or contradictory, and most often involved puppies and/or kitties. (In this world, robots and unicorns have pets. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) These were the things needed for this story, this world. The rest of it didn’t matter.

This is also good writing advice. You should not cede all control to your audience or reader, whether they are 4 or 40. But you should also not wrestle control from your reader at the expense of your story or their enjoyment of it. If you are trying to do a thing and the reader is bristling, figure out why and see if you can address it. A little bristling is sometimes good. But I feel that has to be used sparingly, lest your reader throw a tantrum, i.e. stop reading the book.

Telling these stories to my kid has made me think of what the reader of my work wants and expects and how that abuts what I want and expect. There won’t or shouldn’t be perfect alignment there, except maybe in specific genres where the reader’s expectations are the point, as in the Happily Ever After in many romance novels or the murder on the first page in many mysteries. But if I am subverting the reader’s expectations, I have to know why and what affect it might have on the reader. What happens when I give the reader everything they may want, and what happens if I give them just a little?

Like all writing advice, this is not a rule. The whole point of your story might be to subvert reader’s expectations and shock them at every turn. Great! That doesn’t happen in a vacuum, though, and it might not work just because you want it to. The limits of this, and any writing advice I think, is the point at which the reader will stop reading. You can do anything, basically, up until that point. You don’t always know where that point is. It’ll be different for different readers. But you can’t force the reader to like it just because you do. You can’t force them to read it because it’s good for them.

Bedtime is much easier now that I’ve stopped trying to strong arm my child into liking my stories. And I can still probably come up with a few (hundred) more stories about puppies and kitties.

Take care my friends. Stay safe and protected and masked.

OXOXOXO,

Kate