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zslastman comments on Brainstorming: children's stories - Less Wrong
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When pressed for this I tend to take a particular story, and try to strip it down into it's abstract form - something like - protagonist and companion undergo journey, face 3 opposing characters, arrive at destination and have life lessons confirmed. Then redecorate it with different particulars from other stories - switch males for females, dinosaurs for insects etc. Often this process stimulates my own creativity and i end up with something fairly new, but it guarantees an acceptable bedtime story. Know your audience though. A three year old child mainly wants amusing images. Mild scatology tends to go down a treat as well.
Sounds like something I occasionally do, or try to do (mostly because my kid asks for stories with dinosaurs); do you have a handy list of abstract stripped-down stories by any chance ? (or do you use an existing one like the Seven Basic Plots?) Do you have a usable list of life lessons?
(I'm slowly collecting and organizing material like this, it's something I find pretty interesting, not only for telling stories to my kid ...)
Nope, I generally just plagiarize the last film or piece of fiction I've read. Sooner or later I'll probably end up traumatizing a niece because the last film I saw was by Lars Von Trier. As for life lessons, the typical stuff you teach children of that age group - younger kids need to learn empathy, self control etc. Older ones can be introduced to basic social commentary - sometimes people have to be mean to be nice, sometimes people get sick and go away, but this is nobodies fault, sometimes your imagination is unreliable etc.