One question to ask. "Why did Danya's ink stop following his pencil?" A good answer says: he told the story four times before he inked it, and each telling got a little bigger. He didn't decide to change it.

One thing to do at the table. Each person tells a short true story about something that happened this week, then writes it down in one sentence. Next Sunday, tell it again without looking, then compare it with the sentence. What grew?

Make a two-column page. Pick a family story everyone knows. In ink, write what the person who was there says happened. In pencil, write what the story has picked up since. It is fine if the pencil column is the fun one.

The grown-up layer. Frederic Bartlett's Remembering (Cambridge, 1932) found that retold stories get shorter and drift towards what the teller expects. In 1974 Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed 150 students a film of a car crash. A week later, 16 of the 50 asked about cars that "smashed" said they had seen broken glass, against 7 of the 50 asked about cars that "hit". There was no glass in the film. The season ends on the hardest version of its question: checking your own story, about a friend, with your name on it. The point is not that Danya lied. It is that he said what he did.