Bedtime Story Breakthrough
I tell terrible bedtime stories. My stories are the most boring ever invented. I excel at making up and describing characters (trolls with mushrooms growing on them, gnomes with beards down to their ankles etc.) but I flop when it comes to plot. And Aristotle was right, plot is more important than character.
However, I recently had a bedtime story breakthrough: tell a true story. I love fairy tales, but I have discovered to my chagrin (I consider myself a creative person) that I can't make them up. So a few nights ago I told my three-year-old daughter about the time my mother was cooking a chicken over the camp fire and somehow dropped it in the dirt and sent it to be washed off in the creek by my uncle, who dropped it in the water and watched it float downstream, at which time my brilliant younger sister quickly ran into the stream in her bare feet to rescue our float-away chicken dinner just before it tumbled down a waterfall (the waterfall is a recent addition to the story.)
Instant success. Now I have an inexhaustible repertoire of bedtime stories and no longer have to struggle to figure out what happens next.
Poems and other embarrassing things. ©2009 Franco Bertucci