September 17, 2021

I have recently gained access to the Calm meditation app and have been listening to their Sleep Stories every night. The purpose of Sleep Stories is to pull focus away from the worries and cares of reality and distract the mind in order to achieve relaxation and sleep.

As a fiction writer, I find Sleep Stories extremely interesting forms of storytelling and a great way to study the nature of promises and payoffs when writing a story.

Every story makes promises. A good story makes those promises clear from the beginning, shows progress toward fulfilling those promises, and then fulfills them or gives you something even better. (Brandon Sanderson has an excellent lecture on this concept on YouTube. I highly recommend all writers check it out.)

With traditional storytelling, i.e., written stories for entertainment, promises vary from story to story. On the other hand, Sleep Stories only have one true promise: distraction and relaxation. Every Sleep Story is completely unique, even the ones set in the same world, and yet they all work toward the same set of promises, progression, and payoff. This complex and difficult skill fascinates my writerly mind.

One of my favorite Sleep Stories: Cap’n Dreambeard!

What’s so difficult about writing a Sleep Story? Write a really bad or really boring story and presto! The listener is snoring away.

That actually wouldn’t work. Remember, relaxation comes if the story holds your attention and distracts you from your reality. A poorly written/boring story cannot distract you enough. Without distraction, you’ll lose relaxation, and presto! You’re up all night.

For Sleep Stories, a writer has to create a story that is engaging enough to hold the listener’s attention, but not so visceral that it keeps them awake. It needs to distract and relax. How do you do that?

Top tier writing skill.

Let’s do an exercise with two similar stories with the goal of choosing which we can use for a promise-fulfilling Sleep Story.

In Story A, our main character is an orphan living disenfranchised and abused by a monarchy that can only be dethroned by a magical object. Magical object hooks its plot tentacles into our MC, sending them on a quest halfway across the world to battle fearsome enemies, acquire the magical object, save the world, and confront the king, a.k.a. their long-lost evil brother.

Story B presents a terribly normal and very nice protagonist with a vanilla personality and a single straightforward quirk of a penchant for magical gift-giving. The MC’s grandmother is turning ninety tomorrow, and so the story waves our MC off on a shopping quest within the confines of a limited locale to interact with nice stolid people, find the magical birthday present, and give it to their beloved grandmother.

Story A and Story B have the same basic structure, but if Story A is a giant wave rising higher and higher to come crashing frothing white on the shore, then Story B is the gentle bob of the shallows sliding to a stop upon the sand. Your initial thought is probably that Story A is the better choice because it is interesting and therefore distracting. Story A is distracting, but it’s not relaxing. We want that gentle bob to the sand. Story B is the better candidate for a Sleep Story.

Another favorite story: Mystery of the Lavender Water!

But Jenna! You just said boring stories don’t get the job done. How will something as simple as Story B fulfill the promise?

To fulfill the promise of distraction and relaxation, a Sleep Story’s narrative structure and character design aren’t actually simple. They’re familiar and likeable. A try/fail cycle to answer a question, locate a place/thing, or solve a single problem—these are basic plotlines that quickly and efficiently distract a listener from whatever their real-life stress is without burdening them with fictional stress because they are very familiar and very easy to follow. Similarly, a character in a Sleep Story will be almost a tension-free blank slate, a name with two to four uncomplicated, unoffensive identifying characteristics. Likeable, easy to root for, the Jake from State Farm to keep us relaxed through the story.

But you’re right. On its own, Story B isn’t going to be enough to fulfill the promises of a Sleep Story. What’s going to seal the deal is prose style.

Prose style is the art of linguistics. Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics—all of it woven together to create a specific and strategic representation. Sleep Story prose style is going to transform Story B into the ultimate source of distraction and relaxation.

Heavy sensory detail and imagery forms an immersive setting to distract a listener’s mind. Rhyme, alliteration, and lists create patterned and predictable structure that engages a listener and reduces mental strain. Soft sounds soothe any possible tension. Action beats and dialogue tags control pacing. Sentence variation and structure form natural pauses to regulate engagement.

Soft sounds, predictable patterns, soothing imagery, it all can transform a simple story about a child buying a present for their grandmother into a Sleep Story and thereby fulfill the story’s promise.

Jenna, you are overthinking this. It’s a bedtime story. Chill.

Okay, maybe my writerly brain is taking this to places where the average user of Calm would never go, but I don’t believe I’m overthinking the skill behind Sleep Stories nor the benefit from studying them. Creative projects and their creators work within a cloak of whimsy and imagination that often leads others to believe there is no skill involved, no hard technical rules in play. But that’s not true. Without skill, a Sleep Story cannot make good on its promises. Since they do, you know that there is an intelligent mind behind the story, shaping it with imagination and whimsy, yes, but also strategy and skill.

One of my favorite parts of being writer is that I am constantly learning. I see the story in everything around me, and I pay attention to it so I can better my own writing skills. I am very glad to have Calm’s Sleep Stories in my life not only because they are a tool for me to combat my mental illnesses, but also because I am growing as a writer and storyteller by listening to them.

If you’re struggling with sleep, if you’re a writer wanting to study the promises and payoffs of stories, consider looking into Sleep Stories as a new way of approaching both your life and your art.

Learn more about Calm HERE