Why the stories work

A children’s book earns its place by being asked for a second time. Everything else follows from that. These stories are written for delight first, and the virtues travel along quietly.

What they stand on

The shape is old. A beginning, a middle and an end that genuinely work for a four-year-old, which is the plot unity Aristotle described in the Poetics and that later editors used to divide Shakespeare’s plays into acts. Underneath it runs the hero’s journey, the pattern Joseph Campbell traced through the myths of many cultures in 1949: someone sets out, life turns, and they are changed by what they endure.

The values are Stoic. Four virtues, named in that tradition as wisdom, courage, justice and self-control, and one idea Epictetus put plainly in the first line of the Enchiridion: some things are up to us and some are not, and knowing the difference is nearly everything. A child meets that lesson early on a golf course. The weather is not theirs. The bad bounce is not theirs. How they carry it is.

Being lost, or feeling lost, is the beginning of the gift of being found. Growing is the one part that is ours to make, and it is the part the stories are for.

Holding all of it is the ethic of reciprocity, the rule about treating others as you would want to be treated, which appears independently in cultures and belief systems across the world. It has no author. No one wrote it first and no tradition owns it, which is exactly why it belongs to no single one of them. That is precisely why it travels into a story for a three-year-old anywhere on earth.

One thing we will tell you

Every character carries a real strength and a real weakness, because a character who is simply good gives a child nothing to watch.

And one rule from the story bible, the only one we give away: a ball is never hit. The club swings. The ball flies. In the song, the moment is a sound and not a blow.

How the rest of it is created and conceived stays with the creators. Some of it is better kept as a mystery, because that is where the wonder and the delight live, and a book that explains itself has already stopped being a story.