{"id":18959,"date":"2026-03-11T06:55:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T06:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpbookstore.org\/articles\/uncategorized\/storytelling\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T06:06:53","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T06:06:53","slug":"storytelling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpbookstore.org\/articles\/positive-living\/entertainment\/books\/storytelling\/","title":{"rendered":"Storytelling"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m reading a strange little book called How Fiction Works<\/em><\/a>. It\u2019s by James Wood, who teaches at Harvard and reviews books for The New Yorker <\/em>magazine.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t let his pedigree put you off. Wood is an appealing writer and his book is just what it sounds like, a down-to-earth instruction manual for reading stories. Didn\u2019t think you needed instructions? Stay with me.<\/p>\n

Wood starts with the idea that everyone knows what a story is but not necessarily how one works. By \u201cworks\u201d he means what makes one story good and another bad, or how authors actually tell stories so readers don\u2019t get bored or miss the point.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like painting. You see a painting you love in a museum and you think about the picture, the image, your feelings. What you don\u2019t think about so much is how the artist got the painting to look like that. Wood asks how authors get their stories to look like that.<\/p>\n

Why bother with such questions? Well, that\u2019s where it gets interesting. Wood focuses on the mechanics of stories for a reason. Stories, he says, are most successful when they most compellingly mimic reality.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s more complicated than it sounds. Some writers\u2014especially modern ones\u2014write things that don\u2019t seem at first to have much to do with reality. They\u2019re abstract or difficult or full of seemingly unrelated ideas and images.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, says Wood, all stories, even the difficult ones, are ultimately attempts to picture and reflect on human life. We like stories best when they help us to understand life in a fresh, interesting and nourishing way. How do we know when a story has done that? We just know. It\u2019s instinctive. And that feeling of enlarged understanding\u2014of having been shown something true enough to be worth remembering\u2014is what keeps us seeking out more stories. We need that kind of knowledge. We almost can\u2019t live without it.<\/p>\n

Thus, Wood\u2019s book is really about more than stories. It\u2019s about life. Or, more precisely, it\u2019s about our attempts to understand what is true about life\u2014what we need to know to grasp reality accurately and know ourselves and others. You could say, then, that Wood is interested in the truth. And if he\u2019s interested in the truth, then, at least by implication, he\u2019s also asking questions about God.<\/p>\n

Wood himself actually doesn\u2019t believe in God. He grew up a believer but abandoned faith. Yet he is clearly haunted by questions of belief. His best known book, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief<\/em><\/a>, examines numerous writers struggling with the implications of faith, particularly in the modern era when faith has become such an embattled\u2014or at least such a lightning rod\u2014term.<\/p>\n

For this reason I think Wood would agree that a book about how stories work is also a book about how we try to know God. Wood might say there\u2019s no God to know. But he wouldn\u2019t deny that in telling stories we are trying to get at some larger truth that believers call God and everyone else calls, for lack of a better word, reality.<\/p>\n

As a person who spends his workday editing and thinking about stories I find this a very exciting idea. Not because it makes my work sound glamorous but because it raises intriguing questions about how the mind works and how people, no matter their belief or unbelief, acquire knowledge about themselves and the world.<\/p>\n

The implication, I think, is that just about everything we know comes to us through stories. Stories aren\u2019t just what we do in our spare time, watching TV or reading books or gossiping. Stories are how we know anything and everything.<\/p>\n

It sounds counterintuitive, constructing an understanding of reality using an instrument\u2014stories\u2014that is obviously unreal. But if you think about it you\u2019ll see it\u2019s an unavoidable conclusion. Take your understanding of yourself. It\u2019s a story that begins, \u201cOnce upon a time a baby was born\u2026.\u201d What\u2019s the structure of that story? The advance of time. What\u2019s time? A carryover from the logic of stories. You can\u2019t escape it. Sometimes I wonder whether everything <\/em>is a story.<\/p>\n

Really? Well, if you\u2019re a person of faith like me it\u2019s not such a stretch. What are the first words of the Bible? \u201cIn the beginning\u2026.\u201d A story. The first words of the Gospel of John? \u201cIn the beginning was the Word.\u201d Another story, this one a story about a story, about a God depicted using the image of language itself.<\/p>\n

The implications of all of this are profound and complex. But the bottom line is: Stories are what we have. They are how we know what we know. They are perhaps the closest we will ever come to understanding the creative activity of God. And, miracle of miracles, they are, despite all this weighty significance, available to each and every one of us as an effortless birthright.<\/p>\n

After all, who has not sat at his or her child\u2019s bedside and begun, \u201cOnce upon a time\u2026?\u201d How does fiction work? I think perhaps we already know.<\/p>\n

Jim Hinch is a senior editor at GUIDEPOSTS. Reach him at <\/em>jhinch@guideposts.org<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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