ELI5 - Basic Story Structure For Kids
Over the 4th of July weekend Julie and I were in the neighborhood park with Ellie and we ran into a seven-year-old girl who lives up the street. We love this kid because she’s always so excited to share what’s happening that day but we’ve never talked to her for more than thirty-seconds.
On this particular day while her grandpa was walking their dog nearby she spent ten minutes with us, talking non-stop, telling us story after story.
In one of them an armed robber broke into her house but her dog saved her. In another she won a singing competition and was crowned queen of Armenia. In another, she was being bullied by a girl at school so she told the teacher. The teacher called the police who then arrested the girl, and it was only then that the bully realized the error of her ways and apologized but she still had to go to jail.
At one point she included us in the narrative, telling us she’d been in this park by herself late one night and saw our dog Ellie there, so she rescued Ellie and brought her back to our house, evading another armed robber along the way.
I was kind of awed by her imagination and the speed that she was able to conjure these stories up, but I was also impressed by her inherent gift for structure. Her stories had a beginning, middle, and end, with some twists and turns along the way, callbacks and comeuppance, there was romance (“this one boy was, like, so handsome”), danger, intrigue, and humor. At one point the robber demanded money from her and she said, “What the hell? I’m a kid, I don’t have any money!” We were howling.
Two days later I spent a half-hour talking about story structure to a group of scouts over Zoom, having been invited there by my friend John Lawson. Knowing I had a very limited amount of time and not knowing the exact age range, I put together a short presentation distilling the most important points down to a simple half-hour lesson that I thought would stick.
I thought I would do something a little different this week and pass that lesson on to you in case you know a kid who may be interested in this sort of thing. Maybe you're an educator or you run a children's theater program and you're looking for a simple way to teach these concepts. Or if you know someone who could use this feel free to share it.
I put all of it in a PDF you can download below.
(Adults who are not interested, I'll be back for you next week with some updates and new tools and exercises.)
Thanks, have a great weekend!
Explain Like I'm 5: Basic Story Structure For Kids
FIRST THINGS FIRST: WHAT IS A STORY?
The simplest way to say it is, “A story is something that happened to somebody somewhere.”
I’m going to tell you the most basic version of a story:
Every morning my girlfriend and I take our dog Ellie for a walk in the neighborhood. The morning after the 4th of July we put on her leash and harness and we stepped outside. It was a nice day, kind of cool, so we walked up the block, crossed over a busy street called Glenoaks, walked up to the cemetery, then we came back home. The end.
Technically, that’s a story but it’s a pretty boring one. Nothing fun, exciting, or even interesting happens. There wasn’t anything to make you wonder what happens next. Two things that help turn a boring story like that one into a great story are STRUCTURE and CONFLICT.
STRUCTURE
Structure gives your story a shape that starts with a BEGINNING where you introduce your world and characters, builds up excitement in the MIDDLE, and comes to a satisfying END.
The BEGINNING of your story can also be called ACT ONE. This is where you introduce your main character or characters (the PROTAGONIST), give us the basics of where and when this story takes place, and introduce a problem that your character is going to have to solve. This introduction of the problem is sometimes called the INCITING INCIDENT.
There’s an old saying that the job of Act One is to “Get your characters up a tree.”
The MIDDLE of your story can also be thought of as ACT TWO. The job of the middle of your story is to “Throw rocks at your character up in the tree.” You want to make it as hard as possible for your protagonist to solve that problem. The harder it is the more exciting the story.
Your protagonists have to try and fail, then learn from their failures and try again, each time getting closer and closer to solving that problem, leading up to the final problem, the most exciting part of your story, which is often called the CLIMAX.
The END of your story can be thought of as ACT THREE. The job of Act Three is to “Get your characters down from the tree,” meaning get them to the point where they finally solve the problem and achieve their goal. In some cases they may not achieve it but they learn something along the way that changes them. This is the RESOLUTION.
CONFLICT
Conflict gives your story energy and makes the reader or audience want to know what happens next. With conflict you’re raising a question that they will hopefully want the answer to.
The first part of setting up conflict is giving your protagonist a WANT or a GOAL. They might want to pass a test, win a competition, defeat an evil villain, or just make it home safely.
The second part of setting up conflict is putting OBSTACLES in your character’s way that threaten to stop them from achieving that goal.
Your story is the journey of the protagonist to overcome the obstacles standing in the way of achieving their goal. It ends when your character has achieved that goal or maybe they have tried and failed but they’ve gone through a change because of the journey.
In a story about someone who wants to pass a big test, one obstacle may be that the night before they lose the book they’re supposed to be studying. Or they might wake up late and miss the bus. Your story is about all the ways your character tries to get to school for that test.
A lot of times the conflict for your protagonist comes in the form of an ANTAGONIST like a super villain but it can also be something inside your protagonist, like a fear that is holding them back. Let’s say your character wants to save someone on the other side of a lake but they can’t swim, in fact they’re terrified of water. That’s a form of conflict.
In the middle, or Act Two, if you keep escalating conflict by making the obstacles harder to overcome, it makes the story more fun and exciting. If your character who can’t swim builds a raft but then they get out in the middle of the lake and the raft springs a leak and starts to sink that’s an escalation of conflict. It’s a new problem to solve and in a much more dangerous situation because now they’re out on the water and they can’t swim.
At the end of your story, Act Three, your job is to get them down from the tree. If your character spots a beaver passing by and lassos it with their belt and has the beaver pull them to the shore that resolves your story.
A QUICK RECAP
THE BEGINNING / ACT ONE - Introduce your protagonist, tell us a bit about when and where the story is set, introduce CONFLICT or a problem for them to solve through an INCITING INCIDENT. “Get your characters up a tree.”
THE MIDDLE / ACT TWO - Escalate the conflict for your characters. Make it hard for them to solve the problem that you’ve given them. Let them fail then learn from their failures and get better, leading to the CLIMAX. “Now that your characters are up the tree, throw rocks at them.”
THE END / ACT THREE - Let your characters to solve the problem or, if they can’t solve the problem, let them learn something about themselves that makes them better for trying. Let them find a RESOLUTION. “Get your characters down from the tree.”
Now I want to tell you a different version of my first story:
The morning after the 4th of July my girlfriend Julie and I took our dog Ellie for a walk. Unfortunately she was afraid to go outside because of all the fireworks from the night before. In order to get her out on the porch I gave her some peanut butter. I also took out a handful of peanuts for the crows who live in the neighborhood. They come by every morning while we’re putting on Ellie’s leash and harness. We even gave one of them a name, Richard. When I go outside and yell, “Richard” he and his crow friends fly over to our yard for a peanut breakfast.
Finally we got Ellie to walk but she was still really scared. We went up the block and crossed a very busy street called Glenoaks where there were a lot of cars speeding by going to work. Just after we crossed over Glenoaks we saw two tiny bunny rabbits that didn’t look like wild rabbits at all. They were someone’s pets who escaped. They came over to say hello because they were curious about Ellie and they instantly became friends. Ellie was coming out of her shell, thanks to these very small, very friendly bunny rabbits. We decided we had to help these bunnies get back to their owner and out of danger.
Then Julie looked up the block and spotted a coyote who was watching the bunny rabbits. There’s a whole pack of them that live in the cemetery at the end of the block. We knew that if we left the bunny rabbits they’d get eaten by the coyote so we tried to pick them up but as soon as we did one of them took off running back toward Glenoaks and into the rushing cars!
I ran out and held up my hands to slow down the cars while Julie picked up the bunny, but then we heard Ellie barking and looked back to see that the coyote was trying to attack the other bunny. When Ellie saw her new friend about to be eaten she summoned all of her courage and charged at the coyote who took off running around the corner. Ellie chased it around the corner, then we heard her barking like crazy.
We grabbed the other bunny and ran around the corner to see the coyote had cornered Ellie, so we got next to her to try and scare it away. But the coyote didn’t budge. Instead, it gave out a howl and all of these other coyotes came sneaking out of the bushes. There were at least six of them and they surrounded us, barking and licking their lips. I thought we were goners.
Then I got an idea. I yelled, “RICHARD!” as loud as I could!
After a few seconds we heard him “cawwing” in the distance. We looked up and saw him coming with twenty of his crow friends. When he saw that we were in trouble he and his friends dive bombed the pack of coyotes and pecked at them until they ran away, whimpering and whining, back to the cemetery. We were saved!
After taking the bunnies back to their owner we went back home and rewarded Ellie with all the peanut butter she could eat and gave the crows a whole bag of peanuts. I think all of us had enough adventure for one day. The end.
Did you see the different elements we talked about?
Who were the protagonists?
What did you learn about the world and the characters in the beginning?
Did you spot the inciting incident?
What was the conflict that I introduced? Antagonists?
How did I escalate that conflict?
How did I resolve it?
One last note:
There’s no one "right" way to tell a story. These are just some tools that will hopefully inspire you as you come up with your own. Best of luck!
To download a PDF of this information, click here:
Dropbox - STORY STRUCTURE FOR KIDS.pdf - Simplify your life — www.dropbox.com Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!