Choose how the story is told

What it is

How a book is told is a choice of its own, made apart from the genre. The tellings on offer today are a classic storyteller, epic and grand, lyrical and dreamy, rich and sensory, silly and zany, a chatty narrator, snappy and fast, spooky and fun, and the child's own diary.

What it is for

A telling is not a coat of paint over the same plot. It is the instruction we put above almost every other, so it decides what happens on a page, how fast it happens, and how the characters react to it. The silly one turns a small setback into a catastrophe. The diary hands the whole book to the child's own voice. One topic, two tellings, two different books.

How to use it

1. Tap New Adventure and go to Scene, the third step along the top.
2. Scroll past Genre or Tone to Writing Style, and tap the telling you want for this book.
3. Tap Diary Style to put the whole book in the child's own first person voice.
4. Tap Let Bix choose to leave it open, and a telling is picked to fit the genre, passing over any used recently.
5. Read the Writing Style tag on each idea at the Ideas step before you pick one.

What we suggest

Start with the classic storyteller, which carries almost any topic, then change the telling deliberately on the next book so the two can be read against each other. Diary Style is the largest change of the set, and it lands best with a child who already writes things down. Bix never chooses it on its own.