I write violent stories. I write dark stories. I write them for my own children, and I write them for yours. And when the topic comes up with a radio host or a mom or a teacher in a hallway, the explanation is simple. Every kid in every classroom, every kid in a bunk bed frantically reading by flashlight, every latchkey kid and every helicoptered kid, every single mortal child is growing into a life story in a world full of dangers and beauties. Every one will have struggles and ultimately, every one will face death and loss. 

The goal isn’t to steer kids into stories of darkness because those are the stories that grip readers. The goal is to put the darkness in its place.

N. D. Wilson, quoted in Justin Taylor, "Why N. D. Wilson Wants to Scare Your Children"

One of my favorite stories is a children’s book called Frederick by Leo Lionni. It’s about a community of mice preparing for a winter. They are all busy gathering food and supplies, but Frederick never seems to be helping. He gazes far off into the meadow and closes his eyes for long periods of time. The other mice complain, thinking him lazy. Winter comes and they all hunker down amidst their supplies in the stone wall. The season ends up being colder and longer than they had planned for. Their food, conversations, and hope run low. And that’s just when Frederick rises to the occasion. He tells the mice to close their eyes and begins to tell them stories of the sun’s warmth, describes the colors of the red poppies and the golden wheat then recites a poem about the seasons. The mice begin to feel warm, and they can imagine the colors from spring and find joy again amidst a bleak winter.

Anna Tesch, "When the Stories Stop" 

Our current cultural narratives are increasingly focused on independence, pragmatism, and autonomy. We have submitted to a machinistic, technologically-driven mode of life in which we tacitly accept the materialist viewpoint of physical reality positing that only what can be observed, measured, and controlled is of worth. If something is not useful, fast, or easily accessible, we call it useless. We are busy, distracted, obsessed with activity and entertainment, eyes fixed on screens instead of faces. We are increasingly isolated from the people around us, and what little imagination we do have is dependent on whatever flickers across our screens.

The cultural narratives on which we are thus dependent have as their ideal the independent self, an ideal that unravels our connection to family, community, children, and even our place in the earth. The stories we increasingly tell are of those of personal autonomy and increasing utility, ones in which we throw off ‘the ties that bind’. We have embraced the narrative of the autonomous self and its rights, imagining in vivid films and satisfying novels the scenarios in which we throw off the shackles of family, tradition, and duty in favor of self-fulfillment. Self-discovery. Self-expression enabled by the boundless, impersonal world of technology. Self in total freedom from other totally free selves, none of us protesting any action of another unless it threatens something we desire.

 Sarah Clarkson, "Planned Parenthood: A Failure of Imagination"

Christians believe that this world is so much more than a mechanical soulless machine. And yet, we tend to tell our children stories that (we hope) will only speak to their intellects. We want to give them a list of facts to tick off, like we’re trying to communicate a party platform to new recruits, like they’re nothing but brains ready for programming. We feed their souls sawdust and are surprised when they drift away to other cooks (with different tales about reality).

Kids (and adults) don’t just need the truth in their heads — they need it in their bones. They need to know what courage looks like and tastes like and smells like before they ever have to show it themselves. They need to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly — heroes and villains can show them why. They need to loathe the darkness and love the Light.

N. D. Wilson, "Stories Are Soul Food: Don't Let Your Children Hunger"

[William Kirk] Kirkpatrick shows how stories have always been the most important method of moral education.The Greeks, young and old, pored over Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and shaped their ideals and behavior according to the nobility of their heroes. The Angles and Saxons of ancient England passed down their moral heritage in epic poems such as Beowulf ... The Bible, above all, offers not only abstract doctrines, but stories. When we read or hear a story that stirs us, we want to play a part in that story.

Today, our society, having drifted away from words, has abandoned the use of stories in moral education in favor of "values clarification" sessions. School children gather around and discuss how they would handle impossible moral dilemmas (whom they would exclude from a fall-out shelter, for example.) What values clarification actually teaches is that morality is inherently problematic and only a matter of personal preference. Traditional stories (such as fairy tales, national legends, and most classic novels) present evil as repulsive, and goodness as alluring, a matter of objective law and heroic struggle. The values clarification view of morality is both a symptom and a cause of the moral chaos wrecking our culture. We need, says Kirkpatrick, "stories to live by."

Life is full and rich and complex like a story, not abstract and neat like a theory. The things that happen to us--the great joys, the intense sorrows, the surging passions--are too much like drama to be accounted for by anything less than drama.... What needs to be seen is that virtue in large part is also in the realm of the imagination.  Unless the moral imagination is hooked, the other moral faculties--will, emotion, and reason--are too often over-matched by fear, laziness, and self-interest. The great mistake of modern psychology lies in ignoring this obvious fact ... That is why I believe that our ancestors, both Christian and non-Christian, were the better psychologists. They knew that you must grasp the imagination, and they knew how to do it.

Reading Between the Lines: A Christian Guide to Literature, pp. 61-62

In his essay "Myth: Flight to Reality," Thomas Howard shows that we do almost everything we do out of a deep-down desire for what he calls "perfection." We want to make this world what it ought to be.

It's amazing to me in this passage how closely this desire aligns with the Christian view of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. There's something deep down in all of us, including non-believers, that understands that this world is damaged and in need of redemption, and we do what we do out of a desire for that redemption. In this passage, Howard shows that this desire drives everything we do, from politics to healthcare to law, and even to the creation of stories.

The whole poetic or artistic or mythic phenomenon that we find when we look at the history of human imagination represents, I think, the search for perfection. Now you can give this perfection a hundred names--truth, beauty, goodness, wholeness, bliss, repose, order, form, the eternal, and so on, depending on what you want to stress at the moment. There's no word in human language that will name it adequately. Let's call it perfection here. We all have imaginings of it (some poets would urge that we have memories of it). Perfection hounds us remorselessly. It is what stands over against every experience we have of nostalgia, frustration, and desire. We find sooner or later all the data of our experience will be faulted--our bodies, our minds, our wills, our relationships, our landscapes, our states, our institutions, our programs.

Politics, medicine, ecology, and [law] are our efforts to repair the damage. Most of what we do, starting with brushing our teeth in the morning, would be seen by the angels as a waste of time, since they don't know what it is to be almost wholly occupied with shoring things up. When we've been allowed to take time from our plowing and fighting and brushing our teeth, we have tried to say something about perfection and our experience of the discrepancy we feel between ourselves and perfection. We want tranquility and we find tumult. We want permanence and we find decay. We want order and we find havoc. We want health and we find sickness. We want strength and we find weakness. We want beauty and we find horror.

But neither can we settle for this state of affairs. We are driven by who knows what--maybe it's the Holy Ghost--to complain about this discrepancy, to oppose it, to transcend it. We write about our experience, and we sing about it, and we reenact it because we think that somehow if we can stand off from it and get a look at it, we can get ahold of it once more. We signal our awareness of perfection by making something approximating perfection out of our experience--something true, beautiful, good, and incorruptible.

My essay "Technology? Let's Ask the Storytellers" is up on Humane Pursuits.

In most English classes the short story has become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected. Every time a story of mine appears in a freshman anthology, I have a vision of it, with its little organs laid open, like a frog in a bottle.

I realize that a certain amount of this what-is-the-significance has to go on, but I think something has gone wrong in the process when, for so many students, the story becomes simply a problem to be solved, something which you evaporate to get Instant Enlightenment.  

A story really isn't any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands in the mind. Properly, you analyze to enjoy, but it's equally true that to analyze with any discrimination, you have to have enjoyed already, and I think that the best reason to hear a story read is that it should stimulate that primary enjoyment.

Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 108

When we reward writers who tell us only conventional things in conventional ways we contribute to the decline of a civilization--and a kingdom of faith--which desperately needs good stories. We foolishly settle for stories--on the screen and on the page--which tickle us, instead of demanding those which interrogate us (likewise in our conversations and from our pulpits). We use feeble stories to kill time, when there are so many available that redeem the time.

We must insist, in a cynical age, that there is such a thing as a good story. We should identify and prize the good stories from the past, and we must fulfill our responsibility to tell new ones.

Daniel Taylor, "In Praise of Stories"

My life took a slight but perceptible change in direction in my late teens from reading J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Trolls, elves, hobbits, wizards, dark forests, forest havens, caves, mountain strongholds, treachery, cowardice, courage, perseverance--what have these to do with being a teenager in California during the Vietnam War?

Nothing and everything. I found embodied in that fantasy what every teenager needs to find--especially one coming of age in the moral ambiguity of the late 1960s: that there is a difference between good and evil, that the distinction is usually clear enough to act on, that fighting for good is worthwhile even if one loses, that average, even unimpressive people, can do so, and, far-fetched as it may seem, that good eventually wins out in the end--though not without lingering wounds. 

Even though there is a strong "what happens next" element in The Lord of the Rings, I was drawn not so much into the plot of the adventure as to the characters having the adventure. Maybe it is better to say that the testing of their character was the adventure for me--as I later realized it was for Tolkien as well. I discovered that I did not so much forget myself while reading the story as I found myself going along on the journey, dealing like the nonheroic, comfort loving hobbits with weariness, fear, uncertainty, and agonizing choices. With them I felt terror when confronted with undisguised evil and enormous gratefulness for unexpected good. 

 Tolkien's story gave me the courage to say to myself what I already felt true from my own experience--that good and evil are real, that it matters a great deal which one wins out in the world, and that the outcome depends on me. The Lord of the Rings is filled with unexceptional people--that is, hobbits, elves, and the like--called on to do exceptional things if good is going to survive in the world. Reading the story (and its predecessor, The Hobbit), reinforced in me a tremendous desire that good should win in the world and evil be defeated, and to do what I could to help--not least because it helped me to see that evil was not only out there, but within me as well. I genuinely believe this story helped shape who I was and am. Its characters became my character.

Daniel Taylor, "In Praise of Stories"

From Daniel Taylor's essay "In Praise of Stories" (emphasis mine): 

We are drawn to stories because our own life is a story and we are looking for help. Stories give us help in many ways. They tell us we are not alone, and that what has happened to us has happened first to others and that they made it through. They also help us see, however, that our own story is not big enough, that the world is larger and more varied than our limited experience. They help us be more fully human by stimulating and appealing to all that we are--mind, body, spirit. They help us by calling us into relationship--with other people, with other places and times, with creation, and with God. They help us by giving us courage to be the kinds of characters we should be in our own stories, and by making us laugh, empathize, and exercise judgment. But most of all, stories help us by telling the truth, without which we cannot live. 

. . .

Stories are not optional for human beings. It is not the case that some people like stories and seek them out, and other people do not. ... We are all, without exception, drawn to stories, and it may have to do with the way the brain works. As our experience presents itself to us, the brain organizes the stream of perceptions in story form--making connections between things, seeking out a plot, searching for meaning and coherence, trying to decipher what actions and responses are required. As a result, we are as instinctively drawn to story as to water and food. The attraction requires no education or training or special inclination. 

We are shaped by stories from the first moments of life, and even before. Stories tell us  who we are, why we are here, and what will become of us. Whenever humans try to make sense of their experience, they create a story, and we use those stories to answer all the big questions of life. The stories come from everywhere--from family, church, school, and the culture at large. They so surround and inhabit us that we often don't recognize that they are stories at all, breathing them in and out as a fish breathes water.

 . . . 

A story must, literally, be for our good, though good must be understood in the widest possible way. Stories don't necessarily make you a nicer or more ethical person--though many can; they draw out of you more of what makes you a feeling, giving, thinking, creating, laughing, curious human being. Not every story must improve us--stories are valuable on other scores--but we should be different and better because of the cumulative effect of the stories in our lives.

 . . . 

The stories we choose for ourselves define who we are. Every story defines a community--at least the community of two, teller and listener, at the most the community of humanity. A community, a family, is a group of people who share common stories. The health of any community depends directly on the health of the stories the community embraces. 

From Keats's Endymion:

"All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink."

"Stories are often better teachers than abstract discourses or straightforward exhortations. . .

"Stories instill moral values by giving models for concrete ethical behavior. ... Stories teach, not by being preachy or by tacking on a moral at the end,  but by being good, gripping stories."

--Gene Veith,Reading Between the Lines