The Unbreakable Boy and My Little Dragon

Learning empathy through telling stories.

In the past 12 months, I had the privilege of working on 5 different theatrical film releases with Kingdom Story Company and Lionsgate.

After Ordinary Angels, Unsung Hero, White Bird, and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, this weekend, The Unbreakable Boy gets its turn in theaters.

It's a true story about a boy named Austin who is autistic and has brittle bone syndrome. While he is the heart of the story, the part I resonated with is the father trying to navigate the challenges of parenthood.

Last year, one of my children was diagnosed as autistic. The diagnosis didn't change who she was, but it certainly forced me to become more intentional about how to best understand and interact with her so I don’t inadvertently make her life more challenging.

I promised her that when she learned to read, we would write a book together like I have been doing with her older sister. She already had a story in mind, and whether she realized it or not, there was a lot of depth to explore.

She wanted a story about a dragon who was a little too afraid of the outside world and a girl who was a little too wild for her village... and what happens when they swap bodies and start to understand each other (and learn how the two sides can work together). I wrote the first draft with her before the diagnosis.

We knew she had ADHD so the wild girl was the easier half to write. Now that we have a fuller picture, I’m going back currently and taking a complete 25,000 word middle-grade story and expanding it to somewhere around 50,000 words so I can more fully explore these characters with her and she can help me with what I’m getting right and what I don’t understand about her experiences.

Overall, I think art is a powerful tool to develop empathy and be able to look through a lens you're not familiar with, whether it’s through fantastical interpretations, or bringing a real life story into theaters so people can better empathize with the experience of people in their community they might not be familiar with.

I’m grateful to have been able to be on the team who is helping bring stories like these to a larger audience. And now that there have been as many films as I can count on one hand in the past year, I’m looking ahead and seeing the next one further on the horizon than usual.

I’m taking this as an opportunity to get some more time in with my family, tell stories with my kids, and hopefully help parents connect with their children as well before the film work picks back up.

All the best,
-Ryan (half of C.W. Task)

P.S. The book isn’t called “My Little Dragon.” It’s Winter’s Dragon, but that would have made for a confusing title.