The Great Stories

(author's note: This blog is rather long but you'll have to excuse that. Perhaps once you take into account I never blog you can feel as though I have been saving up blogs and if that is the case it is not that long at all. Or perhaps you can just not read it and then you'll have nothing to complain about.)

"It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered."
Samwise Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers film version


I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. I don’t mean that in the way most people do, having no idea which path to take because there are so many offered, but rather I consistently bounced back and forth between two options. The first was to entertain, at first as an actor but gradually this grew into a passion for filmmaking. The second option was to preach the gospel from a pulpit. My life may clearly reflect my choice now but the question plagued me all the way into my collegiate career and I spent a year as a Christian Studies major at a local Baptist university before transferring to the state school and majoring in film. Still to this day I have thoughts about pursuing one or the other (though having made a decision to focus primarily on filmmaking.) Until recently this seemed like a coincidence, the simple diverging interests that come from growing up attending church and going to the movies on a regular basis. However, I have come to see that it is more than that. There is a reason I am torn between these two professions and a reason why they are not so different as I used to believe. The reason is one word: story.

A story is made up of three parts that most people know: a beginning, middle, and an end. This isn’t a hard concept to grasp considering that our lives are made up of the exact same parts. We are born, we live, and we die. Stories begin and end every day around us and we celebrate one and mourn the other. The construction of a simple story isn’t hard; in fact it’s almost impossible (some would say it IS impossible) to screw it up. I remember watching the commentary to a particularly terrible student film once in which the director claimed, “The movie actually ended up having a three act structure even though we didn’t plan on it.” Besides being laughable it’s quite revealing about how inherent story is in each of us. Think about the last joke you heard or your friend telling you about her day at work. The interesting thing is that most people aren’t thinking about the power of proper story structure while doing this. They are simply thinking about the punch line or about how annoying their boss is. It’s like breathing to us.

Of course those jokes don’t usually stick with us forever and rarely do they affect the world or the way we look at it but some stories do both of those things, those are the great stories. Lately I’ve been trying to figure out just what it is that makes a story great. As someone who would enjoy spending the rest of my life telling stories this seems to be a proper priority. What I am discovering is not new but it is rather eye opening for myself. For my last movie I decided to approach the stories of my grandfather and how they have affected my life (also pulling some stories from my own life.) As that project gets closer to completion I know that it will easily be the best thing I have made so far because in it I gave more respect to the story than I ever have. For the story I am a part of now (and which you may be hearing more of in the coming months) I left the comforts of familiarity and chose something rather different. Still, my eyes had been opened up to the power of stories and I sought (and continue to seek), with great humility, the construction of something more than just an idea or plot: a good story.

I won’t go into great detail about how my eyes were opened but suffice it to say I have a list of books located at the bottom of this and you should read any of them if you’re interested in the grandness of stories and how to better tell them. While the books I was reading inspired me to tell great stories, I had forgotten just how much one could affect me. It was in my research for my latest screenplay that I put a film in my Netflix queue by the name of Lonesome Dove. Having never seen the film or heard the story I went into it not expecting much. The movie (actually it’s a TV mini-series but who really cares?) is a really spectacular production with a pretty outstanding cast but that’s not what drew me in. What drew me in was the story and at a six hour running time it was a long one. But when I reached the end, I got a familiar feeling. It was the feeling of completion, which is wonderful, but it was also a feeling of sadness. I knew that the story had been told and as the pig says “That’s all folks.” But while I was glad that I had just been told a really great story I wasn’t satisfied. Was there something lacking in the story? No, leastways not that I could see. It had the three necessary components (beginning, middle, end) and they were each expertly executed. It had character arcs, sub-plots, foreshadowing, climaxes, plot points, and all the other more complex pieces that go into the making of a great story, yet I felt emptiness. What was missing?

The feeling is one I’ve had only a few times before most memorably with what remains one of my favorite stories: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I remember reading the last lines of the book and being rather depressed that the journey was over. To make matters worse, I had to experience the same feeling all over again when they made the book into movies that instantly became favorites. I’m one of the people you won’t ever find complaining about how many times the film Return of the King seems like it’s ending because each time it doesn’t, I am secretly relieved that I don’t have to leave this world yet, that I may stay a little longer.

I know I’m not the only one who experiences this. A friend who recently finished making his way through Stephen King’s Dark Tower series conveyed the same exact feeling to me upon finishing it. I was able to share in the feeling with others (to a lesser extent for myself) when the Harry Potter books came to an end. I felt it when, despite the lack of perfection in the recent additions, the credits rolled on Star Wars saga. So what is this thing? Why is there always sadness mixed in with the joy of completion?

Well perhaps because life is made up of just that because while our lives are the middle part of the story they are also full of beginnings and ends. It is a great feeling to graduate college yet the thought of leaving those friends and memories does tear one so. It is a wonderful feeling to see a friend get engaged or married but you know things will be different and you can’t help but be a little sad as well. It is a wonderful thing to grow up but sometimes you miss being a kid. I have no experience in this so I proceed with trepidation; it is a beautiful thing to watch a child be born but it also signals the end of the life you’ve known so far. Ends are sad and yet happy, joyous and yet mournful. We want to complete the journey but we don’t want the story to end. Even though the book reads “happily ever after” we wish to see it and experience it, knowing full well that every story eventually ends and that no end is satisfying. But perhaps we just want to delay it for a while. We want the experience of the journey without the bitterness of the end.

That’s when I figured it out. Right there is when I realized something I never understood before. Growing up in church, reading the same Sunday School lessons every year, one becomes rather accustomed to the whole thing. If I’m completely honest these stories easily become boring. As time wears on it becomes hard to grasp why someone would say that thing you hear every Sunday is “the greatest story ever told.” Ten year old me would have rather read a comic book or watched Star Wars for the hundredth time. But that’s missing the point, which is something I’m awfully guilty of. Not only is the story of Christ perfectly constructed (the entire Old Testament itself is foreshadowing) but there is something else going on there. The hero (Jesus) completes the journey but then he does something incredible: he lets us be the hero. The story isn’t over because we get to live it out for the rest of our lives because now Christ lives in us. The characters we know aren’t gone, the journey is far from over, and the reward still waits for us in the end. And what is this reward? Why it is nothing short of the journey’s completion without the sadness of the end. It’s over but the story keeps going forever and ever. How flipping amazing is that? I gain the completion of literally participating in the greatest story ever and it never has to end? That’s why Jesus is called the author AND the perfecter, because no one else’s story even comes close. I think that is why other stories leave us sad because ultimately they can’t fulfill us. God wants us to know that the real satisfaction lies in him alone. Stories don’t satisfy but they can point us to greater truths and, hopefully, the greatest truth of all. It is with this understanding that I finally realized being a preacher and being a filmmaker aren’t such different choices. They are both storytellers by craft and, if done right, both will point to truth. While I may never stand at a pulpit, and I don’t want my scripts to seem preachy, I do want to tell stories that matter. Perhaps one day the stories I tell will help people see truth, perhaps one day I will tell a “great” story, or perhaps I need only be concerned in participating in the story in front of me and the rest will work itself out. Whatever my part I am invigorated by the stories that surround me and by the truth and beauty of the gospel.

I could try and think of a brilliant way to sum up my thoughts in my own words but I came across something the other day in a book called Happily Ever After, which takes the last page from many literary classics, and nothing I could write would even come close.

“And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that happened after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

-C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle




the books I read that helped open my eyes to story (and continue to do so) are as follows:

Story by Robert McKee
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler

I have not read the latest Donald Miller book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years but I have a feeling based on what I've heard about the book that there is a possibility of some similarity in thought. If that is the case then you'll have to forgive me and believe that I didn't rip off Donald Miller and can't wait to read his book. If you have to make a choice I say read the Miller book because he's sure to say it better than I.