What Happens in a Room When a Story Is Told Well

There's a specific moment I watch for when I'm speaking.

It happens a few sentences into a story, and sometimes sooner. The quiet shifts. The restlessness that lives in any audience settles. Phones go face-down without anyone deciding to put them down. Eyes that were drifting come back to the front of the room. The collective attention of a group of separate individuals becomes, briefly and remarkably, a single thing.

It's neuroscience. But sometimes, it can feel like magic. It's the way human brains are wired to respond to narrative. To synchronize, to lean in, to follow a story the way they'll follow almost nothing else.

But story doesn't have to be dramatic to produce that magical reaction.

It doesn't require high stakes or unusual circumstances or a particularly remarkable outcome. What it requires is specificity and honesty. A real moment, rendered with enough detail that the listener can step inside it. A genuine emotion, named or implied, that creates recognition.

When those elements are present, the speaker doesn't have to forcibly manufacture or control the reaction. It just happens. The audience brings themselves into the story. They map their own experience onto it. They're no longer just listening. They're participating, finding themselves somewhere in the narrative.

It's why I recently branched out and landed on the Get Rooted platform. On the blog and inside every graphic that goes on a product, the power of words and story take center stage. Every single person has a story to tell, and we help make that happen at the Get Rooted blog, all while grounding everything in God's truth. Those simple stories change lives.

That's the moment I work toward every time I speak. I don't hope for any applause at the end. No, I strive to achieve that quiet shift, a few sentences in, when the room becomes one thing.

Have you ever felt that shift in a room? The moment when a speaker or storyteller captured everyone at once? What were they talking about? I'd love to hear in the comments.

Why I Speak About Story

I didn't set out to be a speaker.

In fact, the first time I was asked to share my story, a well-respected woman approached me just before, with her narrowed eyes and slight curl of one side of her mouth. She looked me up and down and said, "Who do you think you are coming here to talk to us women? You're barely out of school and not married or a mother, and you're just getting started in life. What could you possibly have to share that would help us?"

Ouch, right? That one hurt. A lot! And although I did get up in front of those women to share my story, I allowed that woman's words to haunt me for the next 15 years. Every time I thought I might have some insight or wisdom to share with someone else, either individually or in a group, that "imposter syndrome" would rear its ugly head, and I'd keep my mouth shut.

Instead, when the opportunity to write fell in my lap, I jumped right on that path. Writing has always held a special place in my heart, and I'd still consider it my primary calling. But for too long, I hid behind the protection of distance between what I wrote and my audience.

After I had a few books and a couple dozen articles under my belt, the opportunity to speak came my way again. Although a part of me wanted to run the other way, I chose to step forward. It took everything I'd learned about communicating truth through story to figure out how to do it standing in front of a room full of people instead of alone at a desk.

Once I stood at the front, the small audience looking at me, I realized something.

The principles are the same. A room full of people responds to story the same way a reader does. The defenses lower, the attention sharpens, the emotional access opens. A well-placed story in the middle of a talk does what a well-placed scene does in a novel. It makes the abstract concrete. It makes the distant personal. It makes the truth become real in a relatable way.

I speak about story because story is what I know most deeply. It's also because the longer I've worked with it in fiction, content, or conversation, the more convinced I've become that it's one of the most powerful tools available to anyone trying to communicate something that matters.

Not just writers. Anyone.

The business leader trying to inspire a team. The teacher trying to reach a struggling student. The parent trying to explain something important to a teenager who has stopped listening to direct instruction. Story reaches where argument can't. It always has.

That's why I speak about it. When you understand how story works, it changes how you communicate everything else.

Has a speaker ever used a story that completely changed how you received what they were saying? What made it land? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Letting Characters Speak Words You Can't Say

Some of the most important things I've ever said, I said through a character in one of my novels.

Sometimes I don't realize it until I'm rereading a scene months later and something in it catches me. It could be a line of dialogue, an interior thought, or a moment of raw honesty that I recognize as something I needed to say and didn't know how to say it any other way.

Fiction creates a kind of permission that real life doesn't always offer. Behind the shelter of a character, a writer can approach truths that feel a bit too risky or maybe even embarrassing to state directly. The character can be afraid, or angry, or broken, or desperate in ways the author might not feel safe being in plain view. And paradoxically, that roundabout honesty often reaches readers more deeply than a direct confession would have.

Readers feel this from the other side too. A character says something and a reader thinks, yes, that's exactly it. That's the thing I've been carrying and couldn't name. The character has done the work of articulation that the reader couldn't do alone, and suddenly the reader feels less isolated in their own experience.

That exchange from writer to character to reader, where the truth travels the long way around, is one of the most quietly powerful things fiction does. It connects people across the distance of their private experience and says, you are not the only one. You are not alone.

That's one of the many reasons I write these stories. And it's a very worthy goal to set, every single time.

Has a fictional character ever said something that felt like it was meant specifically for you? Something you'd been feeling but couldn't find the words for? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

The Story You Didn't Know Your Soul Needed

Nobody picks up a novel thinking, this is going to change me.

We reach for a book because we want to be entertained, or transported, or because someone we trust recommended it, or because the cover caught our eye at exactly the right moment. We come to fiction looking for a story. We don't come looking for surgery.

But sometimes surgery is what we get.

The books that have marked me most deeply are almost never the ones I approached with high expectations and deliberate intention. They're the ones I stumbled into during an ordinary afternoon and couldn't put down, that left me sitting quietly afterward with the specific feeling of having been rearranged. Something had shifted. Something that needed to move had moved.

A few off the top of my head that have left a lasting impact are:

• Down from the Cross by Joyce Livingston
• Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers
• Ribbons of Steel & Ribbons West series by Tracie Peterson
• It Had to Be You by Linda Windsor

I didn't know I needed it until it happened.

As a writer, I find this both humbling and clarifying. It means I can't always know, while I'm writing, which scene or character or line will be the one that does something real in a reader's life. The moment I think will land sometimes doesn't. The quiet, seemingly small moment I almost cut sometimes turns out to be the one a reader mentions years later.

My job is not to engineer the transformation. My job is to write the truest story I can and trust that it will find the reader who needs it, in the moment they need it, and do whatever it's supposed to do.

That requires a particular level of faith, and it's one I'm still practicing.

Has a book ever found you at exactly the right moment? One you didn't know you needed until you were already inside it? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Truth in Disguise: the Surprising Power of Fiction

Fiction lies, technically speaking.

I often joke and say I get paid to lie. The characters aren't real. The events didn't happen. The places, in many cases, exist only in the architecture of my imagination. A novel is, by definition, made up.

And yet.

Readers regularly describe fictional experiences in the language of truth. That character understood me. That story changed how I see things. That book told me something real about myself. We don't say those things about things that are simply false. We say them about things that have gotten somewhere true by an unexpected route.

That's the paradox at the heart of fiction, and it's one I find endlessly valuable. A story can be factually invented and emotionally, spiritually, humanly true at the same time. The invented surface carries something real underneath, and what the reader receives is the real thing, not the invention.

This is why I've never felt any tension between writing fiction and caring deeply about truth. The fiction is the vehicle. The truth is the destination. A well-crafted story doesn't lead readers away from reality. It leads them more deeply into it, through a door that would never have opened otherwise.

In this case, disguise isn't deception. It's strategy and grace rolled into one. It's the reason a made-up story can tell you something true about your own life that no amount of straightforward instruction could have ever reached.

Has a work of fiction ever told you something true? Something you recognized as real the moment you encountered it? What was it? I'd love to hear in the comments.

Why Stories Reach Places Sermons Can't

Why did Jesus use parables and tell stories?

He could have delivered doctrine. He could have outlined theology with precision and clarity and left no room for misunderstanding. Instead he told stories about lost coins and prodigal sons and farmers scattering seed. He wrapped truth in narrative and handed it to people who wouldn't have received it any other way.

That wasn't an accident. It was strategy. And it's the oldest and most effective one we have.

Stories reach places that direct instruction cannot. They slip past the defenses we carry. The skepticism, the self-protection, the quiet resistance we bring when we feel like anything is trying to change us. We let a story in because we think we're just being entertained. By the time we realize it's doing something more, it's already done it.

I've seen this happen in readers. A woman who picked up one of my novels during a painful season and found, in a fictional character's struggle, the language for something she hadn't been able to name in her own life. A reader who said a particular scene spoke to him in a way that years of sermons hadn't touched.

I don't say that to diminish sermons. Preaching is also a key way to convey those hard-hitting truths. But story does something different. It creates an experience rather than delivering a message, and experience changes people in ways that information alone rarely does.

That's why I write fiction. Contrary to what some might think, fiction isn't a replacement for truth. It's stories pointing readers toward it, leading them through it, and wrapped in it.

The story is the sermon the heart is often most willing to hear.

When has a story (a book, a film, a song) reached you in a place that nothing else could? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

What Raising Kids Taught Me About Storytelling

There’s a funny thing about storytelling. You can study craft books, attend conferences, and read hundreds of novels, but some of the best lessons come from everyday life.

For me, a lot of those lessons came during the time I had to step back from writing my novels to focus on my family and being present with my kids.

There were years when my writing happened in the slim margins of the day. During naptime, after bedtime, or in the quiet moments before the house woke up. Those seasons didn’t leave much room for uninterrupted creativity, but they did offer something just as valuable. Looking back at what I did manage to write, I see I had a front-row seat to real human emotion.

If you've ever watched a toddler insist they can do something themselves, you've seen stubborn determination in its purest form. If you've comforted a child after a hard day at school, you've seen vulnerability. If you've witnessed siblings move from fierce argument to wholehearted forgiveness in the span of ten minutes, you've seen a character arc unfold in real time. Of course, in fiction, it doesn't happen that quickly.

Parenting as a Mirror to Character Development

Still, parenting has a way of revealing the layers inside people, both in your children and in yourself. It exposes impatience, perseverance, pride, grace, and the quiet courage required to keep showing up day after day. Those same layers are exactly what make fictional characters feel real.

One afternoon years ago, I remember sitting at the dining room table with a notebook open beside a pile of math worksheets. My child worked through fractions while I scribbled a few lines of dialogue between characters who were stuck in the middle of their own conflict. The two moments seemed unrelated at the time, but looking back now, I can see how closely they mirrored each other.

Both required patience.

Both required persistence.

And both reminded me that even though I like things tied up with a well-formed bow, growth rarely happens in neat, tidy steps.

What a Story Needs

Stories thrive on tension, the space between where a character is and where they need to be. Parenting lives in that same space. You guide, encourage, correct, and hope the lessons take root somewhere beneath the surface. You're also experiencing your own growth journey as a human being, guiding little future adults.

In many ways, raising kids sharpened my understanding of character more than any writing manual ever could. It taught me that people don't change overnight. They stumble. They learn. They try again. And sometimes the most meaningful victories are the quiet ones no one else notices.

Faith plays a role in that perspective, too. Watching children grow is a daily reminder that none of us are finished works. We're all learning, all stretching, all discovering what it means to live with humility, courage, perseverance, and grace.

Those truths inevitably find their way into my stories.

The years of juggling writing with family life may have slowed the pace of blog posts or manuscripts at times, but they deepened the well I draw from as a storyteller. And if there's one thing parenting confirmed for me, it's this:

The best stories don't come from imagination alone.

They come from paying attention to the people right in front of you.

I hope the stories I write now showcase greater depth and character emotion than the books I wrote prior to my hiatus. Although I still struggle with tapping into some of those emotional experiences myself, my characters can experience them for me.

Have you ever noticed how everyday moments—especially with family—reveal deeper truths about people and relationships? What life experience has taught you the most about understanding others? Share it with me in the comments.