Story

Some cool things I've read lately about story...

"The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth." - Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

"We were created for stories, not propositions; for drama, not bullet points." - James K.A. Smith, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?

"If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you." - Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

"We are not outside observers, as if we were watching a movie. We stand within the landscape. We are affected by the landscape. Since we are people of faith, we can even say that we are defined by the landscape. We are also part of the view that other observers see, from their own perspective. And they too are part of the total landscape that we see. Part of the beauty of a landscape is that it draws me, the observer, into it, so that I am engulfed and in a way defined by its greatness. In the case of biblical interpretation, we are people who stand in faith, who believe that the Bible speaks to us, and who therefore are quite conscious that what we are describing is not simply a landscape "out there," but rather, something that is at the very heart of our lives. We are not speaking of the biblical text as if it were dead letter, ancient history, distant memories. We are speaking of a text in which we find ourselves, our very lives." - Justo L. Gonzalez, Santa Biblia

"The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to stop herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well." - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland