When my partner Jean has trouble sleeping, she asks me to tell her one of my “stories.” 

This is a bit of an inside joke because the stories I tell her are just topics that I am writing about for work. Stormwater runoff, dam removals, waterfowl migration, the dangers of invasive plants—these are all “stories” I’ve rambled on about in the gentle darkness of our bedroom, waiting for the moment when her breathing flips from the self-aware, somewhat meditative inhale/exhale of someone trying to sleep to the lush, crisp, nasally sound of someone who is actually, finally, asleep. 

The stories I tell are wide-ranging, but Jean likes “the one about soil” the best, which is when I talk about regenerative farming and its relation to water quality. I’m not sure why she requests this particular story; I think it’s because the words make her picture a garden or feel the warmth and comfort of a rich, hard-packed layer of earth. But as a means to helping her fall asleep, pretty much any subject will work. I can put her to bed with a soothing account of how trees use their roots to drink up acres upon acres of rain water, or with a completely dull description of how wastewater treatment facilities update their effluent permits. 

In her lovely and teasing way, she tells me: I like to hear you go blah blah blah blah blah. 

I know that Jean is not retaining any of the information I tell her, which is fine by me. Margarette Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon, said that kids who ask for a bedtime story aren’t really interested in a plot, they just want to be in the presence of an adult as they drift off to sleep. So, that’s what I give her: my presence.

“For me, this nightly exercise is a helpful way to organize my thoughts about a topic that I have to write and talk about for work.“

So far, it works like a charm. I don’t keep time when telling my stories but my guess is that, on average, Jean falls asleep after about 8 minutes of me talking. Her breathing sounds different when she’s asleep, and that’s how I know when I can stop, though I usually go on an extra minute or two for good measure. Sometimes, the dog, who sleeps in the bedroom with us, will also fall into a deep sleep, at which point there are two warm bodies snoozing away as I wrap up my account of bivalve reproduction or what have you, a testament to the comfort of my cadance and the dullness of my narrative.  

Sometimes, I even put myself to sleep. I will wake up the next day and realize that I literally fell asleep mid sentence, which is something I’ve only seen happen in movies. This is, of course, a failure on my part because if I fall asleep before Jean then she loses a storyteller and thus can’t fall asleep as easily on her own. The table at that point is turned: She must listen to me and the dog snooze away while she’s up squirming around, trying to relax her brain. 

For me, this nightly exercise is a helpful way to organize my thoughts about a topic that I have to write and talk about for work. I’m the kind of writer who obsesses over concision and efficiency, so as I tell my stories (often covering the same subject night after night) I get to workshop my script, finding the most direct and coherent way to explain something, and most importantly, identify the things that I actually don’t know how to explain or don’t fully understand. Do I recommend this as a writing technique? Sure. Go for it. Just be careful not to put yourself to sleep, at least not too soon.