In the last two posts, I considered reasons we seek out stories, whether it’s to help us feel vicariously in control, or to immerse in story for what JK Rowling refers to as “escape, excitement and agency” free of “crushing demands.”

These reflections became necessary to me over the past few years as I began writing out a story idea and decided to commit to making it work. Cue despair at not having the requisite writing skills or insight to craft something I would personally love to read. Why should I bother learning to write a story?

I continue the reflections here by considering story as an agent of healing worth seeking out and learning to create.

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I use the simplest and most accessible ingredient for healing—stories.

—Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves, p 12

When I began to experience poor health, I didn’t realize I couldn’t handle reading stories anymore, whether fiction or biography. I read a lot of non-fiction, desperate to figure out what was happening to me. I did still watch movies and shows, but they were ‘only entertainment’. Nothing serious, no conscious expectations other than to get my mind off real life and rest. Not that binge-watching shows helped me rest at all.

However, now I recognize how I unconsciously craved immersion in on-screen stories and that I was struggling to read at all.

As a church-goer, I struggled to read the Bible despite being steeped in the church’s usually unintentional guilt-tripping. “We just need to read the Bible more,” I’d hear someone pleadingly generalize, meaning they wished they could but couldn’t seem to, or they felt powerless to persuade others to.

But, as far as I could tell, the Bible seemed like a whole lot of crushing demands, to use Rowling’s term.

Skip forward 10 years and I was reading the Bible voraciously. Something had shifted, but it wasn’t that I suddenly decided to give in to the guilt.

I had got more sick, was far more desperate for help, and began feeling uncomfortable with how the Bible’s stories were being interpreted: as heroic allegories I was failing to live up to. I dipped my toe in other kinds of churches/denominations and discovered that the Bible didn’t have to be interpreted as crushing demands. In fact, it proclaimed the exact opposite: good news of heroic help to heal our own sense of failure.

And it’s all told in the context of stories.

To Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s quote above: stories are an ingredient for healing. She goes on to call stories ‘medicine’ (p 61) that need to be curated depending on what the wound is that needs healing. She refers to herself as gathering, prescribing and applying particular myths and legends for particular needs.

The Bible features frequent tragic protagonists, which could seem odd. They screw up their lives and those of folks around them. If they had one modicum of transcendent heroicness about them, they died. And stayed dead. Which becomes a major problem when looking for a hero who can rise above global human problems.

So what I really want from a good story is that it minister to my soul, to offer what I want safe people around me doing: helping me hold out hope for a better reality and giving me vision for how to go there.

I want a story to minister healing to me, to help me recover lasting peace out of turmoil.

From experience, a major part of healing is grieving. Stories offer snapshots of grief that a well-told story can connect to a reader’s real-life grief. If I am recalled to my own experiences and offered hope of moving through that grief to somewhere better—like a compass pointing the way—the story is helping me really grieve, and therefore heal.

I’ve experienced so much grief in the last few years, often feeling out of control and powerless due to circumstances and attitudes around me that I didn’t know how to change. When my health dipped especially quickly and I was bed-ridden often, my husband presented me with a media streaming account. I’ve been noticing ever since this power of particular kinds of story to carry me out of despair: a much needed medicine.

It makes me wonder about particular kinds of story for different aspects of healing. Do we unconsciously seek out particular kinds of stories for particular kinds of relief? I’ll leave that aside for now too.

The potential for stories to mediate healing connects to something David Farland hypothesized and then saw confirmed years later in neuroscience:

People who read frequently become more compassionate, more understanding of others, and thus become better people.

—Daily Meditations: Writer Tips for 100 Days, David Farland

Gaining compassion presupposes taking to heart what a story portrays in genuine human suffering and triumph, weakness and strength, shame and forgiveness, etc.

What about writing story? What can writing do for a person?

Since I began writing, the story developing under my fingers has absolutely helped me grieve and forced a search for understanding reality better, as if I were being taken along a reader’s journey of what I’m writing . . . with a lot more dead ends to face. Like navigating a maze.

Writing has become an opportunity to follow some what-if characters more closely than reading a story, to see how they grieve and work themselves through or deeper into grieving. Basically, it’s my own real-life journey lived through the eyes of various personalities I’ve imagined.

Perhaps writing fiction is like making sense of the route I’ve taken through grief and dropping a few breadcrumbs behind, hoping the reader can follow to find sense in their reality. I forget now where I read a famous author saying that writing is compelling because it’s a way to help others.

My characters have been safe friends because, whether protagonist or antagonist, I’ve been able to explore what their human responses are to tragedy, see if their experience resonates with mine, and discover along with them what does and doesn’t bring healing.

In the last post, I had mentioned discernment, which turns out to be important here, too: discerning what kind of writing is useful for my own healing and what isn’t, what will minister to readers and what won’t. It’s not straightforward. It’s going to take a lot of feedback from editors and readers once it’s published to land on what ministers and what doesn’t.

That would be ideal to me: writing to minister. How to get there?… Feels like another ‘stepping off the cliff’ experience. I suspect I admire certain classic writers so much because their writing did exactly that: ministered to me.

This brings me to thinking of how reading affects conscience, but that will have to wait.

In the meantime, be go be ministered to by good stories.

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Holy Spirit, lead us to and through healing stories.