My Love Affair with "Story"

I'm taking a class on writing from Fresno Pacific. It's actually a class on how to teach a writing workshop; how to help my students get more out of my writing classes. Today I was reading about drafting: the step in the writing process where you just put the story down; where story becomes its own entity; where an idea leaves your mind in favor of the page, yet somehow returning to us fuller and more developed than when we first thought of it.

I love reading the Bible, imagining God as the Author rather than as the Inspirer. If God were going to write a novel, what aspects would he put in it? Would he write with a Christian theme in mind? Would it be fiction with an agenda? I ask this not as a critic, but as a reader, a lover of story.

I think that these questions are unanswerable in some aspect, but what they accomplish highlights something more valid than motive. When I read the Bible, take Genesis, I read it as though God's telling me a story worth hearing, worth knowing. I read it with an understanding that God, knowing and seeing and hearing all, chose to give just these specific details. Just these facts and perspectives. Just these characters and times and places. Thinking of it that way, doesn't it make the Creation myth all the more beautiful? God chose to say "And it was good" in just such a way that that's really all we know about it. He didn't leave us diagrams or formulae or massive Naturalist catalogues (although that would've been impressive). No, he writes, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him." He leaves out many of the whys allowing us to work through them ourselves.

When I think of teaching writing (or writing myself), I think I'll challenge my students to delve more into the mystery of writing--of letting some things be left unsaid--in favor of focusing on the essence of story. Details can be fun and enlightening, but they are just details, after all, and not the story itself.