Pinkie Pie likes telling stories with me. We often end up telling team stories where we take turns swapping who is the one telling the story which means that the stories end up in all kinds of strange places. I often will start a segment with "and an elephant falls from the sky, crushing all of them to death" and then Pinkie Pie will fuss at me and tell me to do it right. Eventually I will stop dropping rocks on the characters and continue the saga of the princess who has a magic wand or the fairy who has to go to school.
One thing that is tricky for me to figure out how to handle is the way Pinkie Pie resolves conflict. She often resorts to instant solutions for plot problems that don't leave much in the way of story. If the princess has an enemy, she just waves her wand and the enemy goes away. If the fairy is swept downstream in a flash flood, she is instantly rescued.
What Pinkie Pie doesn't seem to grasp is that overcoming problems is the key to interesting plot and stories that people care about. Nobody wants to read about the princess who fixes every problem by waving a wand and magicking it away! They want to hear about suffering and challenge and effort to overcome long odds.
I am not quite sure what to tell her about this. On one hand I like the idea of letting her just go with her stories. Criticizing her and telling her that she is doing it wrong doesn't seem especially productive when I really want her to just explore her options and be creative. Her stories aren't *wrong* after all, they just aren't compelling.
On the other hand I want her to understand how to craft a narrative. I want her to learn how to tell a tale that will entrance her audience, and capture their imaginations. Stories about invincible heroes who defeat all comers without any effort are boring.
(The fact that Eddings' stories about Belgarion are as popular as they are is still a shock to me, considering how badly they violate the guidelines I am laying out here...)
I have defaulted to just letting her solve problems instantly with magic or luck without any comment from me. It doesn't make for good stories, but eventually she will see that and begin to craft more interesting resolutions to issues. Or not, I guess, but telling uninteresting stories isn't the worst character trait you can have.
I believe the Belgeriad and Harry Potter and lots of young adult fantasy is about having power and being special vs. plot and conflict. And children wanting to make the world perfect by waving a hand is an innocence worth preserving!
ReplyDeleteI find that most of my narratives involve conflict as well, but the girls aren't as interested. I'm at times at a loss to come up with story lines for action figures that don't have fighting. "Let's try and climb this hill!" isn't gripping for me.
My guess is that if you role model the more conflict-oriented story telling, it might be contagious?