ABSTRACT
One of my favourite stories is from a class of 10-year-olds taking a course in creative writing1. For homework, the teacher started a story as follows:
Once upon a time, there was a king. He had a very big kingdom, and all his subjects were very happy. The only problem was that a big dragon lived just outside the kingdom, and occasionally he came and attacked the people. This had happened a lot recently, and the people were becoming very frightened. The king sent his army to kill the dragon, but he just breathed fire on them, and killed all the soldiers.
