A children’s book earns its place by being wanted, not by being good for you. If a child does not ask for it a second time, nothing else about it matters much. So we write for delight first, and we let the virtues travel along.
The raw story came from F.C. Salas. The question that shaped it was whether it could be a real page-turner, human and interesting, carrying a lesson that is never once preached. Taught by example or not taught at all.
That single rule is where everything below comes from.
A story for a four-year-old still needs a beginning, a middle and an end that actually work. When we went looking for a structure strong enough to carry that, we went where everyone goes eventually: to Shakespeare, and to the way his plays have been taken apart and studied for four centuries.
You meet the characters. A problem arrives. There is a challenge, an attempt, and something that darkens before it lifts. These are proven archetypal shapes, and we use elements of them deliberately.
Wonder. Then something awful. Then hope. Then a new chance. That is the ride, and it is designed.
Act one is wonder: a brand-new ball, a fairway, a sky, a dream. Act two is awful, and we do not soften it. Ace is lost in the tall grass as the light goes, nobody comes back, and he wonders whether that is the end. Act three is being found, and discovering that being found is not the same as going back to how things were.
Then, just as everything seems settled, he arrives at a new course and is lost again. That is not a loose thread. That is the beginning of the next book.
Underneath the three acts is a much older shape, the one the Greeks used: the hero’s journey. An innocent sets out. Life twists into something unfamiliar that nobody prepared them for. They find a way through, and they are changed by it.
Ace does not outsmart his way out of the rough. He endures it. He does not lose faith, and he keeps going, and he is found. There is a kind of courage in that which small children recognise immediately, because it is the kind they actually have.
What he learns is not that he was right all along. It is that life is not about being perfect, that it will take you in directions you did not choose, and that this is the very thing that makes it an adventure worth having.
Ace, Daisy, Sandman, Splash, Speedy and Rangey are built the same way, and they always will be: a real strength, and a real weakness, the way an actual person is made. Nobody in this world is perfect at either end.
That comes from the Stoic ideas one of us learned as a child in boarding school, and it is the reason the stories work. A character who is simply good teaches a child nothing, because there is nothing to watch them do. A character who wants something, gets it wrong, notices, and tries again is a character a four-year-old can learn from without ever being told they are learning.
The Stoic part is not lectures about endurance. It is the plain, usable version a small child can carry onto a course or into a classroom. The shot you already struck is behind you. The weather is not your fault and not your business. How you carry a bad hole is a choice, and it is the only part that belongs to you. Courage is mostly the willingness to keep swinging.
Shakespeare’s acts, the Greek journey and the Stoic virtues all sit on top of a single idea that holds the rest together: treat others as you would like to be treated. That is the core of the Fairway Friends, and it is the reason these stories reach adults as easily as children. They are universal, they are recognisable, and they are the things a grown-up already believes and wants to hand on.
Courage. Keeping your word. Getting up after a bad hole. Treating others the way you would want to be treated. These are older than any of the institutions that teach them, and they turn up in every society on earth, which is exactly why they work in a story for a three-year-old.
They belong to no one faith and no one tradition, and we do not write them as though they do. These are world books. Anyone can hand them to a child, anywhere, and find their own family’s values already inside.
“Swing Away” is not a theme tune bolted onto a book. It carries the arc of the series rather than the arc of one story, which is why it tells you more about who the Fairway Friends are than any single adventure can.
Once upon a golf swing I found who I am.
Once upon a golf swing I became more than I began.
It opens on a ball still white as the day, not a scuff, not a scratch, not yet been played. It goes through the silence of the rough and the daylight growing thin. And it turns on one line that is the Stoic idea word for word: something inside said don’t you give up. This is where the brave ones play.
We keep most of how these books are constructed to ourselves. Here is one rule we are happy to give away, because it tells you almost everything about the rest.
The word does not appear in our books, and it never will, because of everything the word carries with it. The club swings. The ball flies. In the song, the moment of impact is written as a sound, not as a blow. There are other rules like it, and they all point the same direction.
Every golf ball ever teed up, the expensive one and the cheap one, the white one and the yellow one, is very likely to get lost. Sliced into the woods. Dropped in a pond. Gone, and nobody knows where.
In our world, that is where the story starts rather than where it ends. A lost ball gets a second chance, and a third. It might be found the next day or a year later, or never. It might be carried to another course entirely and lost all over again.
That is not a device we invented. It is exactly what happened to the real Titleist Pro V1 that started all of this, which was lost in New Hampshire and turned up in a stranger’s hand on a green in Nova Scotia, hundreds of miles and one international border away. The whole premise is just that true story, told again.
So the series does not have an end built into it. Every ball has an anecdote, a rescue, a scare, an adventure it came back from with a scar. Every course has its own traditions and its own weather. There is always another story.
The next one takes the Fairway Friends to Italy.
Every page is built for the child hearing it and the grown-up saying it aloud. Reading aloud is one of the few things an adult does that returns them to their own childhood, and we would rather that moment be worth having. The sentences have a rhythm meant to be spoken. There is something on every page for the person holding the book.
It is also why these stories land with a golfer who has never bought a children’s book in their life. Golf is not decoration here. It is the room the story happens in, and it is written by people who know the room.
Every adventure is grounded in tried and true child development science: how children ages 3 to 6 listen, and what makes them ask for a story a second time. What that research means for your family, at story time and out on the course, we share in Notes from the Creators.
There is a version of a children’s golf book that is sweet and empty. We are not making it. These are meant to be brainy stories: psychologically built, genuinely entertaining, warm without being sentimental, and honest that things go wrong before they come right.
A keepsake is something a family chooses to keep. That is a high bar. It is the one we are aiming at.
Prefer email? clubhouse@fairwayfriendsadventures.com