Dust to Gold: How to Turn Your Boring Childhood Memories into Magical Children's Books

It usually starts with something completely unremarkable. For me, it was a crack in the concrete.

I was about seven years old, melting on my grandmother’s front porch in the dead of summer, waiting for the ice cream truck. My entire world consisted of a line of ants vanishing into a gap in the steps and the mind-numbing buzz of a fly trapped against the screen door. To an adult, it was just a picture of pure, humid boredom. To seven-year-old me, it felt like an eternity.

Years later, during a brutal brainstorming session, that exact memory bubbled up. But this time, it brought a question along with it: What if that crack wasn’t just a crack?

That tiny thought eventually became my first picture book, The Much Better Day—a Kaya Papaya story for kids who experience the world a little differently. It taught me something liberating: you don’t need a wardrobe to Narnia to write a great story. The magic is already folded into the ordinary moments of our childhoods—we just have to unfold it.

After years of collecting those quiet, sticky moments, I’ve realized that the best ideas don’t come from the spectacular days. They don’t come from the trip to Disneyland or the time you broke your arm. They come from the quiet, mundane moments: tracing the velvet pattern on a sofa while adults talk in the kitchen, getting dizzy under a lawn sprinkler, or the shock of freezing water from a garden hose in July.

These moments are universal. They breathe. And if you know how to look at them, they are absolutely packed with picture book potential.

Here are five simple frameworks I use to take a boring memory and spark a magical concept.

1. The "What If?" Magnification

This is the grandparent of all story starters: take a real memory and ask one massive, unapologetically whimsical "What if?" The trick is to go big. Don’t just twist reality slightly—snap it in half and build something new.

Let’s look at my porch memory: a bored kid waiting for the ice cream truck.

The Swap: What if it wasn’t a truck at all?

The Magic: What if it was a massive cloud-whale swimming down the street, playing music on starlight chimes? And what if the flavors it gave out depended entirely on what you dreamed about the night before? A kid who dreamed of flying gets a sherbet that makes them float an inch off the ground. A kid who had a nightmare gets a warm chocolate-ripple cone that whispers, "You're safe."

Suddenly, that boring afternoon is charged with dream-magic. The ice cream driver isn't a guy in a uniform; he’s a Dream-Diver with pockets full of moon-pearls.

How to use it: Strip your memory down to its core action and feeling. My porch memory was about waiting for something great, wrapped in impatient summer stillness. Now, ask your "What if?" What if the thing you’re waiting for is alive? What if the front step is a docking station for baby cloud-sheep?

Pick the idea you can actually see. Picture books are visual first. If a five-year-old wouldn’t immediately want to draw it, keep pushing until they would. Think of Harold and the Purple Crayon—it takes the simple act of a kid drawing before bed and asks, What if the crayon lines became real? Simple, brilliant, and it fits right in the palm of your hand.

2. The Secret Anthropomorphic Society

Kids naturally assume everything is alive. A stick is a sword, a stone is a turtle, and the wind has a voice. This framework leans into that exact instinct by taking an overlooked object and giving it a massive, secret society with its own rules and urgent missions.

On that grandmother's porch, there was an old, rusty mailbox leaning by the steps that I used to pick at with my toe.

But what if that mailbox was actually the central hub for the Secret Society of Porch Guardians? What if every porch on the block had a tiny hidden door, and the mailboxes were a postal system for small, winged creatures delivering "courage dust" to kids about to start a new school? Those ants I watched weren’t just bugs—they were the delivery crew carrying tiny envelopes on their backs. The story kicks off when the main character accidentally intercepts a letter the size of a fingernail.

How to use it: Scan your memory for the most ignored, static object—a doorknob, a puddle, a pile of laundry, or a lost mitten. Give it a brain. What does a doorknob dream about? What kind of politics do the vegetables in the garden have? (Maybe the tomatoes are the mayors, the radishes are the town gossips, and the corn stalks are the quiet philosophers.)

The fun conflict usually comes from the child being totally oblivious. A kid playing jump rope might accidentally be creating a natural disaster for a miniature civilization living on the sidewalk. Look at The Day the Crayons Quit—the crayons don't change physically; our perception of them does. A memory of sitting at the kitchen table drawing turns into a hilarious labor dispute.

3. The Emotion Made Manifest

Every childhood memory has a massive, often unexpressed emotion at its core—boredom, jealousy, pure joy, or the paralyzing fear of a first sleepover. This strategy takes that invisible feeling, pulls it out of the kid's chest, and gives it a physical body, a name, and a job. It becomes a creature, a weather pattern, or a plant they have to deal with.

Back to my hot porch memory: the real emotion was pure, twitchy impatience.

What if that impatience manifested as a tiny creature called a Fidget? Let's say it’s a small, hedgehog-like thing made of static electricity that gets bigger every time the kid sighs or taps their foot. Now, the story is about a kid trying to wait for the ice cream truck, but her Fidget is growing so massive it’s about to knock over the porch railing and scare the truck away. She has to learn to soothe it—not by stomping on it, but by befriending it and turning the waiting into a game.

How to use it: Get incredibly specific with the emotion of your memory. Not just "sad," but the heavy, quiet sadness of losing a favorite mitten. Not just "happy," but the dizzy, spinning joy of being swung by your arms.

Now, build the creature. What does it feel like? Does it whisper or roar? This is exactly what happens in Where the Wild Things Are. Max’s anger doesn’t just go away; it turns into an island of monsters that mirror his fury, and the "wild rumpus" is his tantrum made physical. When emotions become a journey, kids connect with the authenticity instantly.

4. The Reverse Portal Fantasy

We all know how traditional portal fantasies work: a kid goes through a wardrobe or down a rabbit hole to find magic. A reverse portal does the opposite. It keeps the story set firmly in the real, ordinary world, but lets the magic leak out of a tiny crack, knot, or shadow, causing beautiful chaos.

Let's take that dark little seam in the porch floorboards where the ants went.

What if that crack was actually a rift leading to the world of the Lost-Button Dragons? These are jewel-toned, bee-sized dragons responsible for stealing the paperclips, thimbles, and buttons that disappear from your pockets. One day, a baby dragon accidentally tumbles out of the crack right into the path of the neighborhood cat. Suddenly, a boring afternoon turns into a high-stakes, covert rescue mission confined entirely to the front porch, using a sewing needle as a sword and a spool of thread to climb.

How to use it: Look for a tiny, forgotten physical detail in your memory—a knot in a wood panel that looked like an eye, a water stain on the ceiling, or a tangle of roots. Imagine it opens inward. What comes out? Keep it small enough to fit in the room, but magical enough to disrupt it—like a swarm of polite dust sprites wearing top hats who obsessively alphabetize the kitchen pantry.

The emotional heart here is usually stewardship. The kid becomes the protector of a fragile secret that adults would completely miss or sweep away.

5. The Tall-Tale Chain Reaction

This is the formula for glorious, escalating nonsense rooted in a simple truth. You take one tiny, real action—a dropped pebble, a sneeze, a stubbed toe—and trigger a domino effect of increasingly ridiculous, magical consequences that loop way out into the surreal before landing safely back home.

On that porch, I was so bored I flicked a pebble into the sidewalk crack. That's the real trigger.

The Chain Reaction: What if that pebble fell through the crack and struck a tiny dragon bell, which woke up a bee, who mistook a falling magnolia petal for a ballgown, which attracted a stray moonbeam, which snagged on the ice cream truck's antenna, causing the truck to sneeze a shower of rainbow hail that melted into a totally new, never-before-tasted flavor—pebble-crack-magnolia-moonbeam—right onto the kid's tongue just as the truck finally pulls up?

It takes the core feeling of the memory (impatient longing) and rewards it with utter absurdity.

How to use it: If you’re a writer who tends to over-plot, this is a great exercise to loosen up your brain. Start with a real, small action. Then ask, "Because of that, what impossible thing happens next?" Repeat the process, making each link more surprising, but make sure they share a strange kind of dream-logic. A pebble drops, so something has to ring. A bell rings, so something vibrates. Think of books like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie or The Napping House—they rely on this exact cumulative momentum. Turn the magic dial all the way up and let the chain reaction run wild.

The Golden Rule: See Like a Kid

All of these strategies rely on one thing: believing that the mundane is just magic taking a nap.

As adults, we see a crack in the concrete and think it’s a trip hazard or a structural flaw. A child sees it and thinks it’s a mouth. We hear a jingle and think about spending four dollars on a rocket pop; a child hears it and thinks the world is putting on a concert just for them.

Writing a great children's book isn't about inventing something out of thin air. It’s an act of unlearning. It’s giving yourself permission to sit on that hot porch again, to feel the sweat on your neck and see the ant on your shoe, before anyone told you the world was ordinary.

So grab an old, boring memory. Not the big vacation—the time you spent two hours stirring a mud puddle with a stick, or lay under the dining room table looking at adult shoes. Lay it out like an old photo.

What if that mud puddle was the tear of a sleeping giant? What if a tiny mermaid peeked out looking for a lost pearl?

These frameworks aren't strict rules; they're just spark plugs. Use them to kickstart your imagination. Kids don't need massive epic fantasies to feel understood. They just need a story that hugs their soul and reminds them that their own boring, everyday life is a kingdom.

You just have to find the right crack in the sidewalk.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go stare at my front doorknob. I have a sneaky feeling it’s a retirement home for an old clockwork dragon, and I need to go get the story.

Go find your crack. Happy writing.

— Harvey