Posted: November 19, 2025

The Joy of Story

I think I've mentioned before that in addition to being an editor, I'm also the organist at a local church -- St. Paul's Lutheran in Greenfield, MA, if you're ever in the neighborhood on a Sunday and want to stop by. Once a year, St. Paul's gives me the pulpit to talk about music.

This year, I simply related some of my favorite stories behind some of the oddities that I've stumbled across in hymnals over the years -- tunes like DEO GRATIAS (i.e "The Agincourt Carol") or MAGYAR (i.e., "The Hymn of the Hungarian Galley Slaves"), or hymns praising the industrial revolution or Newton's theory of gravity. Gathering all of this together and sharing it put me in touch with how much I love story.

Long before I became an editor, I craved good stories. The first book I fell in love with was Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull. After reading the version in the Reader's Digest several times, I bought the hardback. I was 13. I still own it. Love for skillfully-built tension or a well-turned plot twist led me to reread favorite books over and over, just so I could admire how well they worked. And after I was introduced to "A Prairie Home Companion," I used to be able to reconstruct the News From Lake Wobegon after hearing it once -- not word for word, but I could string together the key moments. I suspect this habit of dissecting well-formed stories is one of the things that led me into editing.

I'd guess that a love for a good story drove a lot of you into writing. Not everyone. I'm currently editing a manuscript focused on a love of language as much as a love of story, and I've edited several clients who were driven by love of character, with story being secondary. And I'm not complaining — a lot of great books get written that way. But many if not most of my clients started writing because they had a story they needed to tell.

Stories have been part writing for as long as we have written records -- it was a very short move from the first alphabet to The Epic of Gilgamesh. And I'd guess we were telling stories for millennia before then. It's hard to look at the cave paintings at Lascaux and not imagine there were stories behind them, traded back and forth over the fire.

Stories change lives. Non-fiction stories of people who have overcome odds routinely inspire their readers to not give up. Fiction often inspires people into real life careers. I recently read that James Doohan, who played Scotty in the original Star Trek, was given an honorary doctorate by an engineering school because a survey revealed that more than half the students took up engineering because stories about Scotty inspired them.

They've changed history. I've written before about how much the abolition movement owed to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Similarly, the protestant reformation owed a lot to Fox's Book of Martyrs, and The Grapes of Wrath certainly didn't hurt the New Deal.

Ultimately, stories are what make us human. Getting engrossed in a story involves empathizing with the characters, imagining yourself in their place. It uses -- and ultimately strengthens -- the same bits of our humanity that lead us to empathize with each other. It's that mutual empathy that builds communities.

So if you're a teller of stories, or if you simply love losing yourself in one, then be proud. Even if you're just selling a short story to a small online magazine, you're part of an ancient tradition that is at the center of the human story.