Lightman wasn't written. It was spoken. In a dark bedroom, one chapter at a time, over seven nights, to a little girl who asked her daddy for a story.
The journey from those improvised tellings to a finished manuscript taught me something about stories: they exist before they're written down. Writing is capture, not creation. The story was already real in the space between my voice and my daughter's imagination.
The Recording
At some point—I don't remember exactly when—I started recording the bedtime stories on my phone. Not with any plan to publish. Just a vague sense that I wanted to remember what we'd created together.
Those recordings captured something writing never could: the pauses, the false starts, the moments where my daughter's question changed the direction of the plot. They preserved the living quality of improvised storytelling—the way each night built on the last, the way her reactions shaped what came next.
"What about the sister? What can she do?"
And suddenly the sister had pink healing light, because Emma asked.
The Transcription Challenge
Spoken storytelling and written prose follow different rules. When you speak, you repeat for emphasis. You trail off. You use "and then" more than any writer should. You pause to think, and those pauses work in speech but create confusion on the page.
Converting the recordings to manuscript meant making choices. How much of the oral quality do you preserve? How much do you smooth into conventional prose? Every transcribed story faces this tension.
I chose to keep more of the spoken quality than most editors would recommend. The sentence fragments. The direct address to the listener. The way some descriptions pile up rather than flow. These felt true to how the story was born. Lightman is still, at its core, a story told in the dark.
What Got Lost
No written version can capture everything. The warmth of a father's voice in a dark room. The weight of a child's body leaning against yours. The specific quality of tiredness that makes both teller and listener more open to wonder.
The manuscript preserves the plot, the characters, the themes. It cannot preserve the context. When you read Lightman, you're getting the skeleton of something that was once fully embodied.
This is true of all oral traditions that get written down. Homer's epics were sung before they were written. The Bible was proclaimed before it was inscribed. Something is always lost when voice becomes text. Something is also gained: permanence, shareability, precision. But the loss is real.
What Got Gained
The written version allows something the oral version couldn't: sharing with people who weren't in that dark room. Other fathers can now tell this story to their children. Other children can read it alone under covers with a flashlight.
The story multiplies. It escapes the boundary of one family and becomes available to anyone who finds it. This is the power of writing: it takes what was local and makes it universal.
My daughter will eventually forget most of the details of those seven nights. But the book will remain. She can read it to her own children someday. The story we made together will outlast both of us.
For Parents Who Want to Try
If you're making up stories for your children, consider recording them. You don't need fancy equipment—a phone will do. You don't need a plan to publish. You just need a record.
Later, you can decide if those recordings should become something more. Maybe they'll stay private family treasures. Maybe one story will turn out to be worth sharing. You won't know until you have the material to work with.
The story exists before the recording. The recording exists before the transcription. The transcription exists before the book. Each step is optional. But you can't get to later steps without taking the earlier ones.
Start with voice. Everything else follows.