What is Gianni Rodari's The Grammar of Fantasy?

Gianni Rodari (1920-1980) is widely considered Italy's most important children's writer of the twentieth century. He won the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1970, the top international prize in the field, and generations of Italian children grew up on his rhymes and stories. The Grammar of Fantasy is the one book where he explains how he did it, and it is his only theoretical work.

Where it came from

According to the Italian Wikipedia entry, the book was written after a week of meetings with school staff organised by the city of Reggio Emilia in March 1972, and it is dedicated to the city. Rodari had been collecting notes on the mechanics of invention since the late 1930s. Einaudi published the book in 1973, and Treccani describes it as the place where he set out the educational ideas behind his stories. The subtitle calls it an introduction to the art of inventing stories, and it is laid out in dozens of short chapters, each one a technique, an example or an argument.

The games

The stone in the pond. Rodari's opening image: a single word dropped into the mind sends out ripples of associations, sounds, memories and rhymes. You can play it with any word and a pencil.

The fantastic binomial. His best-known idea. One word alone is not enough to start a story; you need two, and the further apart they are, the better. Two words that naturally belong together produce nothing new. Odd pairs force the imagination to build a bridge between them, and the bridge is the story. In one of his examples a group of children were given shoes and light, and invented a boy who, after misbehaving, ends up glowing like a lamp until someone thinks to take his shoes off.

What would happen if...? Take a subject and attach an impossible fact: what if a city could fly, what if a crocodile were an expert in something absurd. Rodari points out that some of the great works of literature start from exactly this kind of question.

Getting the story wrong. Tell a fairy tale everyone knows and change it on purpose. Put Little Red Riding Hood in a helicopter, turn the roles upside down, ask what happened after the happy ending, or toss characters from different tales into one salad and see who argues with whom. Children love correcting the teller, and the correction is already a story.

There are also chapters on riddles, limericks, toys as characters, food games and stories for laughing, plus a section on using the building blocks of folk tales as cards to deal into new plots.

Why adults use it

The tricks are not childish; they are simply stated plainly. Writers use the binomial to get unstuck. Designers and teams use the what-if questions for brainstorming. Parents use the wrong-fairy-tale game on long car journeys. The underlying argument, that imagination is a skill with techniques you can practise, works at any age.

It is also a pleasure to read. Rodari is funny, generous with examples, and never pompous about creativity. If you enjoy his approach, the old tales he loved are close at hand in Calvino's Italian Folktales, which make excellent raw material for the wrong-story game.

How to use it

• Read a chapter, then try the game the same day. The book is a toolkit more than an argument.
• Keep a list of odd word pairs in a notebook for slow moments.
• Play the games out loud with other people. Many of Rodari's examples come from classrooms.