What a Little Girl in Madagascar Taught Me About Stories

Turn off the lamp and the room changes. The closet door is a little farther away than it was. The window is a different blue. Somewhere down the hall the house makes a sound it never makes in the daytime.

I don’t have kids. I have twenty-four nieces and nephews, which is a different kind of education: you get every age at once, and you’re the one who gets handed the bedtime when the parents are done. Before I started this I also spent years traveling, and the thing I kept running into was how much you can say to a kid with almost no words. In Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, a little girl came up to me asking for money. She only spoke French, and I don’t. She pointed at a pizza shop instead. I got it: pizza, not money. Then she turned and waved over her three siblings, who’d been waiting to see how it went. An older girl working at the shop spoke some English and translated the order. We all ended up at a table with a pizza and a Coke each. The only English the four of them had was “thank you,” and they used it a lot.

I still think about that table. No shared language, and still a whole story happened: a plan, a gamble, a crowd arriving, a stranger helping, an ending with food. Kids don’t need the words to be right to follow a story. They need the shape, and someone paying attention.

Bedtime is where that shows up most. Twenty-four kids’ worth of bedtimes, and the hour after the lights go down is the same in every house: someone sits on the edge of a bed and tells a story. That hour is what StoryToons is about, so I want to write down what I think is going on in it.

Why does the dark help a story?

In daylight everything is already explained. A chair is a chair. At night the edges go soft and a child’s imagination fills in what it can’t quite see. That’s usually described as the problem with the dark. I think it’s the point. A story told in the dark isn’t competing with anything else in the room. It only has to be a little brighter than the night around it.

How much light does a child need?

Kids mostly don’t need the dark to go away. They need one thing to hold onto inside it: a voice they know, a story they’ve heard before, a small light on the table.

Our first character came out of that. Vela is a girl who carries a lantern with a star in it, and she has one rule: keep the light low. Too much light and the places she visits close up, like a flower in the sun. I didn’t write that rule as a lesson. It’s just how those rooms felt.

The two things I’d tell a new parent

I’m not one, so take this as the uncle’s version. I don’t have a list. I have two things I keep seeing work.

The first is that the light should be smaller than you think. A night-light, a lamp with a cloth over it. If the room is bright, the story has to shout.

The second is to put the hero somewhere specific. Not “once upon a time,” but “very late at night, in the garden behind the bakery, which only opens for one hour.” Naming a place and an hour makes the night part of the adventure instead of the thing the adventure is hiding from. Kids will finish the sentence for you.

That’s it. The rest is your voice and their questions.