Listening to a Young Storyteller

As a writer and storyteller, I’ve learned that it’s important to put obstacles in the way of my protagonist to add conflict and tension in a story. Recently, I experienced my 5-year-old grandson doing this as he played. He was moving a train along a wooden track and narrating what was happening. To make it more interesting, he started adding obstacles to the train’s progress: taking out a piece of track and adding barriers over sections of the track. He then had to come up with solutions for continuing to move the train along the track. Instinctively he has discovered how to make his play story more interesting.