Video Transcript: Lesson 8
Welcome back to Writing for Ministry. I'm Adam Navis. This lesson, we're going to leave our step-by-step process and talk a little about stories. Now, you may not want to write stories. You may not be comfortable telling stories. You may even think that stories are a less valid form of theological conversation. I'm going to try to convince you otherwise, and then I'm going to encourage you to start thinking in terms of stories or narrative art whenever you write, even if what you write is traditionally considered nonfiction.
Stories are everywhere. It starts when we're children with picture books, and then the stories that we're told as we go to sleep, and it never ends. We encounter stories all the time, at family gatherings, in books, on television, in movies, video games, and sports teams. These are all forms of story and storytelling played out in front of us.
What is a story? This seems at first like a very simple question. After all, we've been hearing stories since childhood: nursery rhymes, fairy tales, picture books, stories around the dinner table, family reunions around the campfire and school at friends' coworkers were surrounded by stories. We tell these stories of what we did this weekend on our summer vacation, what happened to us when the boss called us into our office. We tell children stories about when they were born, what it was like when we were children, and stories about what life might be like when they grow up.
Adam Gotchell offers a simple understanding in his book *The Storytelling Animal* When he writes how stories the world over are almost always about people or personified animals with problems, the people want something badly to survive, to win the girl or the boy, to find a lost child, but big obstacles loom between the protagonists and what they want. Just about any story, comic, tragic, romantic, is about a protagonist's efforts to secure, usually at some cost, what he or she desires, story equals character plus predicament plus attempted extrication.
Sometimes people use the terms narrative and story interchangeably, and in many cases this is fine. But for the purposes of my argument, we need some delineation between the two.
Narrative is a scene-by-scene structure, an arc that moves from one point to another. It's similar to plot. A thing happens, which causes another thing to happen, then another, which leads to still another. There is a causal relationship between events, even if to the reader the only identifiable cause is that the writer of the story has placed the events in sequence. This sequence of events is recounted by a narrator. There are various kinds of narrators. They may be
characters in the events, a character outside the events, equivalent to the author, or so hidden as to be almost imperceptible. In this way, a narrative structure can be applied to many different forms: sermons, video games, poems, and classroom curriculum. A story uses the narrative structure and fills it with setting, characters, and dialog. The progression of time. There's a point of view, and all of these things congeal to shape the reader's experience and determine the story's meaning. This is how story creates a rich, vibrant, and complex form of human communication, and it is why it is a suitable form to talk about something complex like God's action in the world. It requires context, nuance, a sense of process, and a consideration of lived experience. As we gain a deeper understanding of the different parts of the story form, we will be gaining a deeper appreciation for what storytelling offers Christians who want to say something about God, ourselves, or our role in the world.
Because stories have a Scene by scene structure. They do more than just present us with data to support one side of an argument or another. They move a reader from one point to another, often without the reader even being aware of what's happening. Stories affect people differently than other forms of. Literature, because for a short time readers turn over the control of their consciousness to the author, and live alongside the story characters. And when they return to their own world, and their own lives, they do not return unchanged.
Stories are memorable; they stick in our brains. Stories are sneaky. Stories build community. Stories can build empathy. Stories cross boundaries. And much of the Bible is stories.
The church has done many things: feed, teach, fight for justice. But whatever else it does, whatever other good it does, it is a mark of the church that it tells and retells the story of the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and return of Christ Jesus. It does this in everything it does, in the sacraments, in evangelism, in social justice, in children's ministry, in fights for human rights.
Christ himself taught in principles and precepts at times, like during the Sermon on the Mount, but he is most known for his use of parables to instruct and evoke. There is emotion in the prodigal son. There is social complexity and subtlety in the parable of the good Samaritan. There is tangibility and specificity to the parables of the sower, the lost coin, and the treasure buried in a field. Each is drained of its power if they're reduced to a moral imperative, honor your father, help people. There are different kinds of people. Look for what you've lost, seek a treasure. As stories, though, they stick to our insides like hearty food on a winter day.
It may strike us as odd, but how else does the saving act of Christ on the cross, this thing that happened 1000s of years ago, renew itself in each subsequent generation without some residue of the original event activated in the retelling? The power of story is a power of transformation.
Robert McAfee Brown writes that the power of a story is a power over which we do not have ultimate control, since it can catch us off guard, tell us things about ourselves which we would prefer not to know, and liberate us to move in directions we would never have imagined.
All right, you might be more comfortable writing in a more traditionally academic style rather than seeing yourself as a storyteller. This is probably because, as you were growing up, it's likely that your school rewarded a very distant, removed voice in your writing. You got better grades if you were able to use big words and sound very smart. The problem, let's be honest, that kind of writing is boring to read.
This isn't to say that you always have to tell stories or that you can't interweave other more direct kinds of writing into your work. Check out the Ira Glass video that I've attached to this lesson, where he talks about the rhythm of his work, where you go, you alternate between telling a story and making a comment or making a point, going back to the story and making a point, story point, story point. It's very similar to the last lesson we talked about: what is, what could be, what is, what could be, and then answering the question, what are you going to do? Or as we talked about it, is action inaction movement.
Your assignment then this week is a fun one. Think of a story, preferably a funny story and tell it to a couple friends, then find another group of friends and tell it again, then do it a third time with still different people, and then think about what changes as you tell it for each time. Try to identify moments of action and moments of thought or reflection, that story commentary story commentary. I hope you really have fun with this. As you move into the world of writing, you don't have to love stories as much as I do, but I do think it's important that you're able to use the tool of storytelling when it's the best form for what you need to say.
Next lesson, we're going to go back to our process and our draft. We're going to be talking about how to get feedback on our work and embrace the vulnerability that's inherent to writing. Hopefully, you've been working on this, and you have by then what you will consider a solid. First draft of what you're working on. Let's write.