What I Wish I'd Had When She Was Seven

My daughter is 13 now. She draws constantly. Characters with complicated backstories, landscapes with specific moods, comics that go on for pages. She has a style — actual style, recognizable and hers — that she’s developed over years of just making things.

I’m not sure when it happened. There wasn’t a single moment when she went from “kid who draws” to “person who is genuinely good at this.” It was gradual. And somewhere in that gradual becoming, a lot of the early work disappeared.

I have a few things. A drawing of a cat from when she was maybe six, kept in a folder somewhere. A birthday card she made for her grandmother at around age eight, with a drawing of our house that has a permanently too-large chimney. But most of it — the napkin sketches, the notebook margins, the back-of-the-receipt moments — is just gone. She made it, and then it stopped existing.

That bothers me in a way I didn’t expect it to when she was small.

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Here’s what I’ve been thinking about while building Three Word Tale.

A comic strip generated by this game is a time capsule. Not a polished one. Not a professional one. But a real one. It captures exactly the words a specific person said on a specific evening, and exactly the drawing they made — wobbly lines and all — and it holds them together in something with a permanent URL that won’t go anywhere.

The seven-year-old who contributes three words about a dragon is leaving a record. The eight-year-old who photographs a crayon drawing is making something that will exist, findable, years from now.

I didn’t have that when my daughter was seven. We didn’t have a way to take the kitchen-table game — the one that made her laugh and think and draw on napkins — and turn it into something we could keep.

This is what I’m trying to build.

Not a game, exactly. Or not just a game. A way to capture what it looks like when your family makes something together. The words your kid chose. The drawing your partner made. The story that nobody planned and everyone contributed to and which will never exist again in exactly that form.

My daughter’s seven-year-old drawings would be extraordinary to me now. Not because they’d be good — they wouldn’t have been good, not in the way she’s good now. But because they’d be hers. Completely, specifically, irreplaceably hers.

I can’t go back and capture those.

But maybe someone else can, with their kids, now.

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When I think about who this game is for, I keep coming back to parents of young kids. Not because the game excludes anyone — it works at any age, and we still play it as a family — but because the stakes are highest when the kids are small.

Children change so fast. The voice a six-year-old uses to tell a story — the particular logic of it, the things they think are funny, the dragons who become librarians for reasons that make complete sense to them — that voice is not permanent. It evolves into something else. And then it’s gone.

I want Three Word Tale to catch it.

I want families to have a folder somewhere with ten, twenty, fifty comics in it — each one a snapshot of a specific evening, with specific people, making something specific that couldn’t have been made any other way.

I’m building this for the parent who, fifteen years from now, pulls up an old comic and shows their kid the drawing they made when they were seven.

“Look,” they’ll say. “You made this.”

And they’ll both be able to see it.