Twelve bedtime questions that start a story

How was school? Did you brush your teeth? Where is your other sock? Most of what we ask at bedtime is there to close the day down.

There is another kind of question that opens something up. Ask it in the dark, with the light off and nowhere left to be, and it starts a story: one the two of you make together, out of nothing, in about four minutes. You do not have to be good at this. You need one question, and a willingness to say yes to whatever comes back.

These are twelve that work in our houses. The groups are loose, and they exist only so you can find one fast when your mind goes blank at ten past eight.

Doors and places

What is behind the small door at the bottom of the garden? You do not have a small door at the bottom of the garden. You do now. The answer is hardly ever “nothing”. It is a staircase, or a shop that sells exactly one thing, or a very polite badger with a problem.

If our house had one more room that we had never found, where would the door be, and what is inside? Children are quick with this one, because they have usually thought about it already. The room tends to be behind the bath.

Where does the number 12 bus really go after the last stop? Buses, trains, the lift at the shopping centre: anything that goes somewhere by day can go somewhere else by night.

Animals and what they get up to

What did the cat do while we were out today? Or the dog, the goldfish, the pigeon on the roof across the road. Pets lead a whole second life, and your child knows far more about it than you do.

Which animal in the garden is in charge, and what are the rules? This one produces whole governments. Expect a snail with strong opinions about noise after dark.

If the birds outside were leaving you a message, what did it say? The stories from this one are short. Sometimes it is just a warning about the cat.

The same day, with one thing changed

Tell me about today, but this time you could fly. The day they have just had, retold with one rule broken: the school run, the maths lesson and the walk home, all seen from the air. It is a lovely way to hear about their day without asking how it went.

What if the teacher had turned out to be a pirate at lunchtime? The same trick, pulled with a different lever. The ordinary day is the set, and the one change is the plot.

What would have happened if we had turned left instead of right at the park? A fork in the real day. A child who is shy of inventing from nothing will happily invent from something that nearly happened.

The child as the hero

You wake up tomorrow and you are the only one who can see the dragon. What do you do first? Put them in it. Not a character a bit like them: them. Their bedroom, their school, their best friend, and one impossible thing.

A letter arrives for you with a stamp from a country that does not exist. Who sent it? This question carries its own next chapter, because the letter can say anything and ask for anything.

If you were leaving on an adventure at dawn and could only take what fits in a shoebox, what is the one thing you would pack? Not quite a story on its own, but a doorway into one. Whatever goes in the box will be needed later.

Keeping it going

Once a story has started, a few small habits keep it alive.

Say yes, and add one thing. Whatever they answer is now true. Your only job is to accept it and add one small detail of your own. “A badger. Of course. He’s wearing a hat, isn’t he?” Then hand it back to them.

Let them decide the next bit. When the story reaches a choice, leave the choice to them. “The staircase goes up and it goes down. Which way?” A child who makes the decisions stays inside the story. A child who is simply told the story drifts off, which, at bedtime, is fine too.

Ask what the character wants. If things stall, give the badger a problem. He has lost something. He is late for something. Somebody wants his hat. A character who wants something makes a story that moves.

Stop on a cliffhanger. When the four minutes are up, finish on a question instead of an ending. “And when she opened the box, there was a note inside. We’ll find out what it said tomorrow.” Tomorrow, they will remind you. An unfinished story is one that gets thought about in the dark, and that is exactly what you want.

Keep a few threads. Some of these turn into serials that run for weeks. The badger gains a family; the bus route grows new stops. Let the good ones come back.

Knowing when to stop

Stop while they still want more. Four minutes of a story they love beats fifteen minutes of one that has run out of road. Stop if they are drifting off, obviously. And on some nights, skip the questions altogether, because the right question is the plain one: are you all right, did something happen today? The stories are for most nights, not every night.

A story that asks them back

These questions feel familiar to us because Journee is built around the same small mechanism. Each letter is a chapter of a story in which your child is the hero and their family are in the cast, and at the end a P.S. hands them a choice: left or right, the cave or the river, trust the stranger or don’t. The next letter follows the road they picked. It is the “which way?” from the bedroom floor, posted through the door. You can see how it works at /how-it-works, and how we use that P.S. at bedtime in the P.S. trick at bedtime.

In the meantime, there is a small door at the bottom of your garden. Someone really ought to find out what is behind it.