Are You a Good Judge of Stories?
Here's how to tell.
Once we establish that stories are important, what’s next? What are we supposed to do with this information? Should we run off and watch some new, smutty reality show on Peacock? After all, that’s a story…
We first must learn story discernment. This is indispensable because exercising discernment in stories translates directly into real life. That’s one of the many good things stories do: build our discernment muscles.
Discernment in stories becomes discernment in life.
This is a built-in design feature. New Testament writers often point to Old Testament stories for this purpose. Good stories provide processing lenses by which we understand our own lives and the people around us. Because Mrs. Bennet is a thing.
BUT it’s hard work. Why? Because we must recover both the art of storytelling and the art of story discernment. Both went down the toilet with the advent of modern education.
Why Are Stories So Difficult?
The fact that stories are hard to get is actually surprising for a lot of people. They don’t *feel* hard to understand. We can easily track the plot on movie night. Which leads me to a crucial point:
Stories are easy to consume but hard to understand.
Here’s where SO many people get this wrong. We assume that because they are easy to consume, they are, therefore, easy to understand and easy to judge. This is actually a devastating problem as we attempt to explain stories.
Stories make us feel more deeply than just about anything else. You can be sitting at the DMV reading a novel, tears pouring down your cheeks, immune to everything else. You are not really at the DMV; you are somewhere else entirely.
And that’s not a bad thing. In itself, that’s not escapist (more on that later). In fact, it’s a design feature of stories; it’s what makes them powerful.
HERE is the problem. Our emotions are not a good ballast by which to determine whether a story is good or bad. It’s a problem when we confuse our feelings with what’s true about the story.
“We’ve mistaken the feeling story gives us—that deliciously seductive pleasure—for its purpose.” 1
In his book, The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall demonstrates how MRI studies reveal that when consuming stories, our brain activity isn’t that of an observer, but of a participant.
Did you get that? Our brains literally encounter stories the same way they do life experiences. It’s been scientifically proven!
Let’s unpack that. Say something happened to you: an emotionally-charged life experience - a bad breakup or a deathly sick child. If someone else were to tell you that your experience was flawed or somehow didn’t happen the way you thought, you might feel your hackles rise.
Each story we consume IS a life experience. That means we feel pretty set up in our opinions about stories. Our personal feelings about Marvel movies, Austen novels, or a Dickens book are final and absolute. People down to the youngest age are intensely, strangely, wildly, dogmatically opinionated about stories.
The result is that when some people read, say, Twilight, they think it’s good literature. Bless their hearts.
I remember when I used to think it would be easy to write a novel. And then this happened:
“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.” —Flannery O'Connor
Most of us actually don’t know the first thing about stories.
It’s like eating a delicious meal; easy to do. But that doesn’t mean you would know what to do with a dead chicken lying naked on your cutting board.
That makes any conversation about stories uphill work. But it’s worth it.
A Few Takeaways:
If you’re serious about learning story discernment, I would recommend Lewis’ book An Experiment in Criticism. It’s the best resource I know of for framing how we should approach/think about stories.
If you don’t want to read that, no worries. I will base much of my material moving forward on that book and try to clearly articulate it as best I can.
YES, the proper name for this is literary criticism. But if that term makes you flinch, that’s actually good. What we usually think of modern literary criticism today is not actually literary criticism at all. That’s why I usually avoid mentioning it.
If I could summarize Lewis’ book in a word it’s this: try to receive a story simply on its own terms. Check your assumptions at the door.
Note I said assumptions, not emotions. Lewis never wanted us NOT to feel stories. That’s like telling someone to eat ice cream but try not to taste it. But at the same time, don’t be dictated by your feelings. Confused? More on this coming up.
Note I also said assumptions, not thoughts. Don’t check your brain at the door.
Sorting out our emotions and assumptions is ESPECIALLY important with Bible stories. That’s why we MUST learn this stuff.
My assignment for you is to watch a movie or read a novel and simply receive it without judgment. Use your mind to pay attention to what the creator is doing with the characters, plot, dialogue, and theme. Take notes if you can. Not that you won’t ever judge it, you will. But you can’t till you first receive it. That gives us something to build on.
Let me know in the comments how it goes!
Cron, Lisa. Story Genius (Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed, 2016). Kindle Edition.