I began researching the power of story because I was marvelling at how my body and soul respond to stories. Years of stress, PTSD and deep grief seem to have heightened my sensitivity to even imaginary yarns. The ache after being immersed in imagined beauty and adventure and truth and hurting characters and happy endings (if that gives you a hint at the genres I camp in) is profound.

Not only that, but a story began to develop in my head a few years ago and it hasn’t let up. Every time I took notes, thought-space cleared for new character and world development. When I put pen to paper—or, rather, fingers to keyboard—the hard work really began. Which, of course, leads to moments of despair.

Why put all this time and emotional energy into writing a story?

Without having landed on a single ultimate answer, I offer a series of casual reflection posts about what makes story so important to me on the receiving end, and what keeps me learning how to write this story I’ve got inside.

First, let me consider feeling in control via story.

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Stories of any genre, fiction or non-fiction, resonate with and reflect reality, even exposing aspects of it that I struggle to understand: safety, danger, love, hate, courage, fear, etc. Well-told stories identify and name these kinds of things in such a way as makes me feel better able to understand and interact with reality, like maps of where others have been to show me where to go.

Sean Coyne of The Story Grid editor fame observes that

…to align ourselves better with reality, we have to change the way we process signs and signals. This isn’t very easy to do, hence our need for stories on which to model our behavior.

—Story Grid: Action Story, 2024 eBook edition

Coyne appeals to history, where story began as humans passing on knowledge. People learned through story to discern signs and signals of reality and respond appropriately for survival. Story met and still meets a need by offering the listener/reader/viewer ideas of how to get where they want to go via appropriate behavior adjustment.

In this way, story offers hope of safety by better understanding one’s situation as it really is in order to restore control over it. This leads me to realize that stories can make me feel less out of control by offering vision for where to go next in my real-life messes.

The irony is that story, itself, is a controlled reality being manipulated by its writer: it offers the appearance of controlling apparently out-of-control forces by the ‘right’ behavior. It takes discernment to know whether the behavior was objectively always right, or whether it’s right for me give my unique circumstances. More on that later.

Feeling in control makes me feel safe. I also know that a sense of control can get blown up in seconds and leave me desperate for help to understand what got me into this mess and how to get out. Cue more stories, because I have past experience—testimony—of story soothing away that feeling of powerlessness.

Perhaps understanding-as-regaining-control could be better phrased as regaining harmony with what’s going on around me. Not control as a fearful grip, but as a clear-minded response to and navigation of complex events and factors. Think of a skilled horse trainer who understands and respects but doesn’t fear the untrained horse. Likewise, I’d like to gain a better understanding of reality through frequent forays into the what-ifs story provides and learn to judge if the author is speaking true things about real life so that I’m better trained to deal with the wild horse.

One intriguing aspect of story is that it allows readers to immerse in characters’ imagined socially unacceptable behaviors. Like safe experimentation. A book called Teaching Religion and Film (Watkins, 2008) points out that adolescents

…enjoy films that feature characters who question authority figures or break society’s rules, especially regarding sexuality.

Readers, listeners and viewers of stories intuitively know that they can get a cathartic release—an ‘emotional rush’—out of immersing in the characters and activity “without entailing the consequences” (p 216). It’s a dangerous experiment under control.

What I find interesting is that, time and time again, stories demonstrate that it’s not controlling my own situation that I really crave, but having control over myself, being enabled to drive this vehicle I’ve been given.

It makes me muse on how the Bible, a collection of books written over a 1300-year-or-so span, frames all its content in stories. All its law, poetry and prophecy are presented in the context of stories about what was happening in the cultural worlds of the time. Its irony as literature is that control is never secure in human behavior, the way other ancient epics portray their physically powerful warriors and kings, politically sly queens and femme fatales, heroes and heroines. In fact, the way the Bible presents reality, it’s human behavior that screws up lives, over and over, while holding out hope for something more powerful and lasting and transcendent than flawed human behaviour.

That’s relatable.

The Old Testament stories report disappointing human histories interspersed with glimmers of hope. The overall disappointing trajectory only serves to increase the reader’s craving for an outright explosion of right-ness that those glimmers suggest may be possible. But it seems dependent on this God we read about really being all he and everyone around him boasts that he is.

If you’ve ever been told that a Bible character is a hero and you should be like him/her, you may be surprised to find that, in the world of literary studies, these characters are considered quite tragic and always fatally flawed because they never live up to the stories’ own deep human ache of having one’s own self under control enough to help the rest of the world. No one ever seems capable of consistently expressing the right emotions and taking the right action at just the right time, every time, to control the environment. The characters are momentarily heroic, sometimes for years at a time. But then they screw up, and, sooner or later, die.

Oh, reality.

If the Bible and its God don’t seem realistic in the first place, it can help to know that the Old Testament holds exactly that tension: this God keeps inserting himself into the stories, but he doesn’t seem to fully restore a sense of control.

What the f—? (as the psalmists say … in their own way). Was it all just fables?

Until we get to Jesus.

Once we’ve read the stories about Jesus, we’re forced to look back over the history of this God he claims to reveal. If we doubted or outright rejected that God of the Old Testament, the stories about Jesus necessitate us re-evaluating whether that God—who didn’t seem powerful enough or good enough through the Old Testament to fix whatever obvious problems we saw (oh, let’s say, rape, genocide, slavery, child sacrifice, etc.)—is, perhaps, expressing right emotions and taking right action at the right time, at the same time as humans go on doggedly rejecting, thwarting and abusing his right emotion and action. We find ourselves doubting our doubt about him and doubting the humans involved—ourselves included—even more.

In the end, it’s not the human characters who offer consistent models of behavior in the Bible to restore a sense of safety in control (though they offer glimmers), it’s this mysterious God who claims to guide human behavior without bruising “broken reeds” or snuffing out “smoldering wicks” (Isaiah 42:3).

Next post, I’ll look more at the experience of immersing in story, its effect on the reader/listener/watcher, and that issue of discernment involved.

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Holy Spirit, you know when it’s the right time for the right behavior. Counsel us.