The Now and the Know

Recently I went to one of my favorite coffee shops in the Des Moines metro to have a little time to myself. I settled in at a corner table at Caribou Coffee and opened up my Macbook to do some writing. However instead of writing I ending up doing some listening and reading… about writing! I happened upon an interview on YouTube by one of favorite authors, Chuck Palahniuk. You may or not have heard of Chuck, he’s a lot more popular than he used to be. He wrote the novels Fight Club and Choke, both of which are now major motion pictures. Recently he released a new novel, Pygmy which I have yet to read. Though he is crude and occasionally vulgar to point of excess, Chuck is one of the better satirists of our time, in this writer’s humble opinion.

So in the aforementioned interview Chuck was asked what he thought made a good story. His answer resonated with me in a lot of ways. He said:

A good story is not the story that stuns everybody into silence. A good story is the story that excites everybody and evokes them to tell their stories… You see how this story, this idea has a connection with everyone’s life and resonates with everyone’s personal experience… You’ll get everybody’s version of that same thing. Those are the stories I look for.

For a period of time in college I was an English major (I ended up with a minor) and had dreams of becoming a fiction writer. During that time, as you can probably imagine, I spent countless hours reading fiction and studying the “art” of the story. I have been reading Chuck since I was in high school and for a long time I think what I was drawn to was the “stunned silence” aspects of his stories. Novels such as Survivor, Diary, and Haunted all contain within them moments that draw the reader in and simply blow him/her away. The unexpected happens and you just can’t believe it because you never saw it coming. It really makes me think of this episode of FX’s wildly popular show Nip/Tuck. If you’re not familiar with the program, it’s about these two plastic surgeons who live in California and the crazy lives they lead. I don’t watch the show at all any more, but there was a time when I did. There’s really no reason to though, most of the time it’s just trashy television.

So I’m tuned into an episode of Nip/Tuck with my then roommate in college. In this particular episode the guys were called into to help following some kind of disaster (plane crash I think) and were set-up doing surgeries in a gym that had been converted into a makeshift hospital. I cannot remember the exact details as it has been five years since I saw the episode, but Sean’s wife’s mother was believed to be on the plane when it crashed. Sean’s wife is taken to see her mother, who is a patient in the gym/hospital. Her face is completely covered by bandages, so you can’t tell if it’s actually her or not. As the episode progresses, it is somehow communicated that Sean’s wife’s mother wants Sean’s wife to “mercy kill” her b/c of all the pain she’s in. Eventually, in a scene far more dramatic than I’m describing it here, she suffocates her with a pillow. I’ll spare you the rest of the details, mostly because I can’t remember them, but towards the end of the episode as she is struggling with what she’s done… wait for it… her mother walks in!!! So who did she kill??? I remember at the moment feeling completely shocked. I did not see that coming. And for a long time in my writing career I thought that was what made a good story: the big twist. Give the reader something they did not expect. And part of a good story that pulls people in is the unexpected, but I will touch more on that in my next entry.

I would share with you all some of my first attempts at short stories… but they’re just a little too terrible for that. Seriously. There was no effective dialogue, no building of characters, no critical thinking really required, nothing but a plot that led (or pushed?) you in one direction and then turned quickly in another. But that’s not a good story… at least not on its own. Like Chuck said above, a good story evokes people to tell their stories. Why? Because people connect with a good story and the person telling it. A good story speaks into the reader’s life; it stirs up in them a voice that says, “Yes! I get that! I’ve been there!” There is a simply brilliant novel/memoir by Dave Eggers called A Heart-Breaking Work of Staggering Genius and it is one of my favorites. The prose style of Eggers in this novel is extremely difficult to read and at times approaches a “stream of consciousness” level. But the book is so great because Eggers does what I think every good writer needs to do: he let’s us in. And even tough the story is all about Eggers’ world and his life and his struggles, somehow it resonates. We as the readers are able to somehow or another identify with the struggles and joys and surprises and regrets that make up a human life on this broken earth.

If I had to have a thesis statement (and Dr. Gammon would want me too) it would be this: the story of God and his people is a great story. Why? Because of all the flash and unexpected twists? Maybe to a certain extent. But what makes this story truly great, according to Chuck, is how it resonates with other people and makes them want to tell their stories. And the more I think about it the more I’m convinced that THAT is why the story of God and his people is a great story.

Think about the last great sermon you heard preached. It was probably funny, the speaker was probably very engaged and knowledgeable, there might have been clever powerpoint slides or will used video clips. Is that what a great sermon is? No. A great sermon can include those things, but that it is not just those things. I don’t usually know that I’ve heard a great sermon until about a week later… when I’m still thinking about it. When I keep discovering places in my life into the sermon continues to speak or shed light. I love it when people come up to me after I’ve given a sermon and say things like, “Wow that story you told was great! I wish interesting things like that happened to me.” And I always wonder if you they really were listening, because more often than not the stories I tell are not extraordinary by any means. Stories of missing a catch during little league, stepping in an ice-fishing hole as a child, and being the only person who couldn’t see the picture in the “magic eye” painting are not exclusive to me, these are experiences everyone has had. I’m not sure anyone is better at this than my Senior Pastor, Mike Housholder. I can very distinctly remember an Easter he gave when he told a story about his wife and daughter coming home excited about watching “Bee Movie”. Not extraordinary by any stretch of the imagination, but from that relatively simple tale Mike was able to pull out tale of how God relates to his people. And that’s what I think great preaching is: helping people to realize their story and how God is a part of it, whether they’ve realized it yet or not.

And we all do it, even if we don’t consider ourselves “preachers.” If the Bible is truly relevant not because the events contained within it happened but because they happen (Rob Bell) and if those stories often inspire someone to tell his story about the time he fell away from God like Adam and Eve, or the time she got mad at God like David in the Psalms, or the time he got upset because it was like God wasn’t holding up his end of the bargain like Jonah, then the Bible is a GREAT story.

So, what’s your story?