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From Leland Ryken’s Crossway Christian Guides to the Classics:

Why do people tell and read stories?

To tell a story is to

(a) entertain and

(b) make a statement.

As for the entertainment value of stories, it is a fact that one of the most universal human impulses can be summed up in the four words tell me a story.  The appeal of stories is universal, and all of us are incessant storytellers during the course of a typical day.

As for making a statement, a novelist hit the nail on the head when he said that in order for storytellers to tell a story they must have some picture of the world, and of what is right and wrong in that world.

The things that make up a story.

All stories are comprised of three things that claim our attention—

  • setting,
  • character, and
  • plot.

A good story is a balance among these three.

In one sense, storytellers tell us about these things, but in another sense, as fiction writer Flannery O’Connor put it, storytellers don’t speak about plot, setting, and character but with them.

About what does the storyteller tell us by means of these things?  About life, human experience, and the ideas that the storyteller believes to be true.

World-making as part of storytelling.

To read a story is to enter a whole world of the imagination.  Storytellers construct their narrative world carefully.  Worldmaking is a central part of the storyteller’s enterprise.

On the one hand, this is part of what makes stories entertaining.  We love to be transported from mundane reality to faraway places with strange-sounding names.

But storytellers also intend their imagined worlds as accurate pictures of reality.  In other words, it is an important part of the truth claims that they intend to make.  Accordingly, we need to pay attention to the details of the world that a storyteller creates, viewing that world as a picture of what the author believes to exist.

The need to be discerning.

The first demand that a story makes on us is surrender—surrender to the delights of being transported, of encountering experiences, characters, and settings, of considering the truth claims that an author makes by means of his or her story.

But we must not be morally and intellectually passive in the face of what an author puts before us.  We need to be true to our own convictions as we weigh the morality and truth claims of a story.  A story’s greatness does not guarantee that it tells the truth in every way.

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