I'm fascinated by animals that some researchers believe have moved beyond basic communication and into having their own form of language. Bees dance, prairie dogs use calls and body language, and dolphins have names. That last one is my favorite. And we can't forget that chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans can all be taught sign language.
My daughter is one year old, and she's learning to talk now. But she's understood my words for a little while already (like the time I gently told her “no no” a couple of months ago, when she tried to touch the unlit fireplace, and she burst into furious tears). It's neat watching her learn to really speak. It started out, like it always does, mostly as parroting, and then when it moved beyond that it's been almost all nouns. Mama, dada, baba (bottle), buh-buh (brother), doh-doh (dog), duh (duck), that sort of thing. She's moved on to slightly more complex concepts. Hi, bye, uh-oh, and no. No is one of my favorite things to ask her to say. And “no” was the first word she said that I felt was interaction and not just naming or parroting – one night I put her to bed when she wasn't ready to go to sleep, and she started shouting “No, no, no, no!” It's also the first word that she said in response to something I said to her, rather than simply repeating what I asked her to repeat. I asked her to say a different word and she shook her head and said, “No, no. No.” Watching her learn how to communicate is fascinating. I loved the process when my son was a baby, also.
My son is four now and his language skills are impressive for his age. He's smart and sweet and funny and also occasionally deeply unsettling (like the time he told me that he had to challenge the monster that lives inside our mirror and “makes that noise”). And as excited as I am to teach my daughter to really communicate, I'm excited to be teaching my son the part of the human experience of language that I believe is the most fundamentally important to us as something a step further along than the other animals on our world – storytelling.
We read every night after the baby is asleep; one bedtime story, a few poems, and two animal facts pages. He knows what a story is. But anyone who's ever let a little kid tell them a story knows that their version has a beginning, and a middle, and more middle, and more middle, and middle forever, with no end in sight. My son's imagination is wild and wonderful, it's perfect. All that I really have needed to do is show him the structure and he's going to be an amazing storyteller. It's been easy to do that using the books that I read to him. After we finish his bedtime story, we talk about what part was the beginning, and what part was the middle, and what part was the end. He likes to talk about the beginning and the end together, and define the middle that way. It's funny, that's how he writes the words “mom” and “dad,” too. The first and last letters first. And I think that's how a lot of writers figure out their stories. This is where I'm starting. This is where I want to end. How do I get there? Or at least I do. I have a file in my laptop called “How I want it all to end” for both of the series I have in the works. Maybe thinking in that way is part of storytelling. Maybe he's going to be really, really good at this someday. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.
He's almost got it at this point. And he's becoming very interested in telling his own stories. Right now what he wants to do is tell me what characters and events he thinks I should add to my own novels. That would be fun for him, if I started adding little elements that he suggests into my books. But my books are for adults, he wouldn't recognize how I'd have to change and arrange things. He wouldn't be able to read them until after he didn't remember what his suggestions were. I think it will be more fun for both of us and much more fulfilling for him if I help him to write his own stories. I'll be guiding the structure and helping him with things like continuity and clarity, but the characters and the plots will be his. I'll be printing them up and putting them in a binder for him to keep. And I think, if anyone would be interested in children's stories by a child, I might share them sometimes here on my blog. With my son's permission, of course.
I'm excited for this. I think that he'll get a lot of enjoyment out of it. And even if storytelling isn't something that he winds up falling in love with the way that I have, he'll have these stories to keep for as long as he wants to revisit them. Something we did together, something that I helped him learn how to do. Exploring a deeper kind of human communication.
Edited to add:
I was thinking after I posted this, and I want to clarify that nonverbal communication is communication, that nonverbal storytelling — music, art, dance, gestures, laughter, glances, expressions — is storytelling. Most of the thoughts in our minds are the stories that we tell ourselves. When I say “Exploring a deeper kind of human communication” I in no way mean to imply that this applies only to verbal communication or verbal storytelling.