When C.S. Lewis was a child, he and his brother, Warren, created imaginary worlds. His was called Animal Land, and Warrren’s was called India. Eventually, they combined their worlds into one big one called Boxen. They used toys to play out the life there and must have spent countless hours “building” its elaborate geography, history, personalities, and dramas. Not surprisingly, Boxen also became the setting of countless stories that Lewis wrote from approximately the ages of six to fifteen.   

At some point, the Lewis brothers stopped playing their game and stored their Boxen toys in a trunk in their father’s attic. Then when their father died and C.S. Lewis had the task of selling the family estate, he had to decide what to do with the trunk. He wrote Warren on January 20, 1930, and said, “The toys in the trunk are quite plainly corpses. We will resolve them into their elements, as nature will do to us.” A short time later on the afternoon of February 23, the brothers buried the trunk in the garden unopened, feeling that a final look at the toys would hardly measure up to their memories.

Clearly, the world of Boxen was meaningful. (After all, it’s not every day you hear about two grown men getting together to bury old toys.) We will never know all that Boxen symbolized to the Lewis brothers, but we do know that it was a world unto itself, deserving (in their eyes) a fate in keeping with the rest of humanity.

The building of such worlds is at the heart of storytelling and reveals the second habit of a storyteller. Namely, a storyteller plays with stories to get inside them.

Okay, not every child is C.S. Lewis. Then again, C.S. Lewis wasn’t exactly C.S. Lewis as a child. He was simply “Jack” to his friends and family. Still, is it reasonable for a typical six-year-old or a fifteen-year-old, for that matter, to create his own Boxen? Given the right inspiration, why not?

But easier (and perhaps better yet), children can pull whole worlds from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “cauldron of story” and play with those stories. Find a doll and play Cinderella or a tower of blocks and play Jack and the Beanstalk. For older children, reenact Beowulf or the quest for the Holy Grail with puppets or peg dolls. Through the act of playing, the world will come to life. Better still, it will be a new version of the other world, unique to the child creating it.

The real magic happens in the telling that goes along with the playing. After all, Lewis himself said in a letter to a Mrs. Ashton dated February 2, 1955, “a story is only imagining out loud.” Anyone who has ever observed a child playing with toys has seen him talking aloud, sometimes whispering quietly to himself, as he acts out whatever is going on. That is the natural course of play. We want our imaginary worlds to be seen and heard in order to make them real.

If we want to harness this with the goal of cultivating storytelling, then we could encourage the child to go a step further and perform his world for an audience. In this way, the child would put on his play, dramatizing it through his toys, or even without them at the dinner table or before bedtime.  

In classical speak, this is called the art of narration. In its most developed form, narration is a full-blown storytelling with all the dramatic flair a child can muster.

This is especially helpful for learning certain story phrases like “once upon a time” and “happily ever after” and story elements like “the turn” (aka the great reveal) and “the unraveling” (aka the dramatic fall after the climax). There are many other phrases and elements and so on, and a child does not need to know the technical terms for any of them. The main thing is that the child comes to embody the ideas reflected in the terms through imitation.

For example, the more a child repeats familiar story phrases, the more he will be able to coin his own. “Once upon a time” will soon turn into “Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy” (Lewis’s opening line for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) or “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” (Tolkien’s opening line for The Hobbit).

No matter what the line turns into, it starts from the same model—once upon a time. The variation comes through the course of play as the child develops his own voice. Speaking his voice aloud attunes his ear to what is appealing and what is not. It compels him to compare what he is saying with what he has heard from familiar stories. He will naturally ask himself, “Does that sound right?”

Once he can answer with an enthusiastic yes, then he has become a true storyteller. The more he tells his stories aloud, the better he will eventually be able to write them. As C.S. Lewis said in a letter to a burgeoning storyteller named Miss Jane Gaskell, “always write by ear not by eye. Every sentence sh[oul]d be tested on the tongue, to make sure that the sound of it has the hardness or softness, the swiftness or languor, which the meaning of it calls for.”

And that’s precisely what a child will learn to do through play acting (aka ‘Boxening’ his stories) his stories.

First Image Credit: Baby at Play by Thomas Eakins (1876)

Second Image Credit: Child with Toys, Gabrielle and the Artist’s Son by Jean by Auguste Renoir (1985)

Third Image Credit: The Puppet Show by Théophile Emmanuel Duverger (1901)

Fourth Image Credit: Children Acting the ‘Play Scene’ from Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii by Charles Hunt (1863)