What a Story May Say

What kind of reader are you? I have often wondered that

about myself. You see, a love of reading was never a natural disposition for me, not so natural as a love of story. I used to avoid reading. As a kid, I had a fixation on horses, and my parents bought a book subscription focused on that topic to get me to read. They canceled it, to my dismay, because I spent more time with the horse anatomy poster than any of the books. I used to try to cheat in my independent reading in school until my English teacher called me out on it. Even when I went to college to become an English teacher, I did not have a love of reading. While all the other students in my program shared their love of reading, which kindled their desire to become English teachers, it was my love of making stories that sent me on that path, not reading them. I was chagrined that a common adage is “good writers are good readers” because I really wished I could become a good writer without the whole reader nonsense.

I know what I have said amounts to sacrilege among

readers, writers, and English teachers alike. Here is where I can admit to you that I changed. I am still not as avid as I could be, but I have upgraded from loathing reading to liking it, and I have been rather introspective about what makes the difference. According to World Population Review, the average number of books read a year in America is seventeen, and the numbers have been trending down, as reported by Above & Beyond ABA Therapy. The world of education has long noted a decline in reading attention span, reading comprehension, and in students becoming lifelong readers, with the National Center of Education Statistics being just one among many sources on the topic. My students are in the same boat, and as a reluctant reader, I empathize with them more than they will ever realize. However, my shift from liking books to becoming an English teacher has shown me the importance of becoming a lifelong reader. I don’t even need to digress into easy commentaries on society to make the point that choosing to read is crucial to a person’s well-being.

Now, we could spend time discussing why this downward

trend exists. I have written a Master’s thesis before. I could easily shape another on this topic if it didn’t lack a necessity in creation, with how many scholarly sources have already tackled this bug in our system. As a teacher and someone who is becoming a more avid reader, I have been more interested in how someone like me could go from reticence and loathing to liking, loving, and enjoying. Because I believe it is important for my students’ well-being to join me on this journey into readerdom, I have been deliberating what caused the shift in me and if it is something replicable to aid my students down the path I am traveling as a reader.

This is no simple question, and many have tried to answer

this question with varying levels of success. See The Book Whisperer as one popular example. However, there is another saying about horses and drinking that I have found in my experience trying to apply the great lessons from that book. To an extent, I owe my current reader status to trying to apply Miller’s advice without being a hypocrite and a strong desire to improve my writing. These convictions have indeed made me a better reader, or at least more frequent. In my readerliness. I either dive deep and could be considered a good reader, or I glance off the surface and have imposter syndrome over my career choices. In my desire to help my students make at least as much progress as I have, I can’t rely on the contagion of loving reading because I have not myself fully caught it. So, I look back on what made me start down the path to becoming a reader. That, too, is no easy question.

I grew up with my mother reading The Chronicles of

Narnia to my brothers and me in the evening, and all sorts of other books. Was that the seed, or was it when I started creating my own stories as a child? My first definitive step on the path, the part where I choose to step, started with a lack of agency. My middle school English teacher caught me trying to deceive her during independent reading, and she criticized my choice of book, saying it was below my reading level. She sent me to the school library and said she would not admit me back to class unless I had a book at my reading level in hand. I was livid (I now love you for this Mrs. Vaughn). That book that permitted me back into class was Rising Dragons by Bryan Davis, and it changed my world, or at least started the path to change.

Since my mother read us C.S. Lewis every night, I had not

read another fantasy book, to my recollection. It was the first book I devoured; the first to make me picture another person’s story so vividly that it felt like I was there. This is no insult to Mr. Lewis, I do not count that initial experience because the book was read to me rather than me reading it. I could also picture those books quite vividly. However, Mr. Davis’ book, being my personal experience, was the first time I realized that books could be a movie playing out in my mind. It put me on such an excited high that I couldn’t wait to read another book. Yet, with the next book I chose, such notions were dashed, the spark gone, and through no fault of the author. It was this and the subsequent school-day experiences that have led me to believe that one facet of becoming a reader is finding the genre that fits best in your skin.

Indeed, after that experience, I was bereft of fantasy in my

reading life until another English teacher had the class read The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. That was an anomalous experience in both that a teacher chose a fantasy book for a class, and in that, I did not like it. However, in looking back on the experience, I think it was more that I had not yet learned to savor a story, and Mr. Tolkien’s prose was something too heady for my anime-addled modern child mind. As an adult, I find my preferred writing voice tends to lean more toward Lewis or Tolkien when I really get the gas going, yet I play a shade and change my tone as I shape my authorial voice to its different purposes. That moves too far from my point, so I shall set it aside for now. The part where it grafts in is only that I believe what makes a person a reader is not so defined a thing as a predisposition, though, given time, predispositions within being a reader will emerge. First, a person must find the language of their heart in literature, and mine is fantasy.

To deepen that point, the first book I’m reading in 2026 is

The Art of Writing and the Gifts of Writers by C.S. Lewis, and I found that, in many ways, he could put to words a notion I could barely describe that lends itself overly well to this point. In one of the essays, he describes two types of readers for stories. I will highly encourage you to pick up the book and wash yourself in his prose. It is short, and the audio version is only around four hours at a moderate pace. However, I will summarize his thoughts that stumbled me on epiphany. Two types of readers are those who read the story and find excitement in the danger, and those who find excitement in the danger’s nature. That is a butchering of his point. The emphasis he was making was that there are those who derive excitement from that which excites: thrills, danger, jumping from one adventure to the next. Another type of reader finds excitement in the depth behind the action. He presented several pieces of evidence to support his point, including a keen illustration of a book he had enjoyed that was adapted for film.

The filmmaker changed a pivotal scene in the story to

lease the first kind of reader/viewer, and, as Mr. Lewis found himself in the second camp, the change removed his sense of fulfillment. I will provide my own example to build on his thesis. I adore the book Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. It has been a favorite for years, not because it is the highest form of literature, although I could extol its merits, but because I, too, am the second kind of reader. Much as in Mr. Lewis’s film-viewing experience, when I saw the movie adaptation of the book, similar switches were made by the cinematographers. I will add the same caveat as Mr. Lewis: such changes may better suit the filmmaker’s medium, but they shift the story toward catering to the first kind of reader mentioned.

One scene that does so most noticeably is when they aim to

first escape Capricorn’s village. In the book and movie, Dustfinger comes to the rescue of Meggie, Mo, and Aunt Elinor; however, the device of rescue shifts. In the book, he lock picks them out, and they sneak through the village to Aunt Elinor’s car, and they drive off in a rush as one of Capricorn’s men seeks to delay them by firearm, as Dustfinger slashed all of Capricorn’s men’s tires. In the movie, Dustfinger provides Mo with a copy of The Wizard of Oz, and Mo reads out the tornado that assaulted Dorothy’s home in Kansas. Why does the change matter? Well, a tornado tearing through Capricorn’s village is adrenaline-inducing as you watch buildings, men, and vehicles ripped from the weathered streets, and our band of heroes tries not to be caught up in their tool for escape.

However, there is no depth in this danger. It is danger

because it is dangerous. The question is, will they survive the storm? The book’s escape is equally dangerous. They creep through the village of villains, risking capture, injury, and death. They narrowly avoid each and make their getaway by a hair. However, the questions from this escape are more than just about survival, though that question remains. The questions shift more toward the weaknesses in the characters that may give them away and the strengths that aid their flight. The crumbling village serves as a backdrop that raises questions about its history and the active role it plays in aiding and deterring them. The motivations for each character’s actions are raised and obscured, drawing you to sink into their hearts and root out the truth of who they are.

One of my favorite quotes from this book comes from a

plaque over Mo’s workshop door: “Some books should be tasted, some should be devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly,” (Funke, 2003). I can extend this metaphor to include types of readers. There are some of us so pulled in by BookTok and Reading Culture that we see books only as to be tasted. By necessity, they become that first type of reader because the second takes introspection and deep discourse with the text. Those trying to beat 100-1000 books in one round of 365 days do not have the luxury to really sink their teeth in. So, punches of emotion are all they frequently engage in, and whether it was their disposition or an acquired taste, they become that first kind of reader. Those who devour may be a hybrid or perhaps a transition between Mr. Lewis’ two types of readers. They consume the story, and even in the mad dash of book culture, there is a savoring like what Mr. Lewis mentions in another part of his essays. They will be the ones to process the books even after they are done. They revisit the books they have read, not for easy thrills but because the story compels them to reach for something deeper time and again. Those who chew and digest the story, I believe, would be the second type of reader. They don’t fear the dragon because dragons are fearsome; they fear the dragon because of a world that a dragon could live in, the impacts that a dragon could have, and the implications of the dragon’s presence that cannot be replaced by a villain with a revolver or cyclops, or any other danger. They are consumed with the world; the author may not have fully divulged the ties that bind the story, no matter how fantastical to our reality, to humanity, to the timeless.

But how does one find the flavor of story that suits them

best? How can my students become those who never relinquish reading if not find a love for it? My approach thus far has been to give them the freedom I was given and the freedom that led me to the books that have become a delight to me. I do not think that this is quite good enough. Outside of the world of books, I find our modern world bereft of story. One of the great enemies of my writing has been that I am sick for the need of story. Like my students, I find myself gravitating toward the podcasts and video essays of YouTube, which are of great interest to me, but do not fill that creative well. I have found myself winding back in time as much modern storytelling in TV shows, movies, and even books I have found largely wanting for a variety of reasons, including that mentioned in the previous paragraphs of how modern storytelling seems to gravitate more to danger is danger and therefore is exciting rather than danger is its own world that needs to be chewed and explored. This return to older works is not something I can faithfully apply in my classroom due to curriculum restrictions and the limitations of language.

Language is the greater barrier. These texts, which are not

even overly verbose, buffet against the minds of my students because their palates are not accustomed to the texture of this food. If by Rudyard Kipling was a poem I memorized in fifth grade, and it has made an impression on my heart to this day, and when I bring it to my classes, they treat it as foreign as Homer or Shakespeare. That too could be its own great discourse – the why of what turns the language of these texts into a locked iron gate. This is a barrier I may help my students vault over, as long as they choose to jump. It is a skill honed in partnership, and a rare few ally themselves with me on this matter and acquire the tools to dig deeper into texts that were previously hidden behind the very words meant to convey the tale.

What a story may say is often lost in how it is said. This

goes for well-crafted and poorly wrought literature alike. I have been overly concerned with how to make my students into readers and how to mold myself into a reader, but nothing can be done if the opportunity isn’t taken. So, that is my solution: to provide my students and me with the opportunity to enter this world of literature and glean from it all its value. If you have read this far into this longer post, you must also seize this opportunity. You obviously have an interest in these rambling concerns. Or perhaps, you will find that the truth of your success in reading to the last line wasn’t a matter of simple interest but the unraveling of an equally profound mystery. After all, I have told you a story today. A story that you may need to chew and digest before you see it in its fullness. That has long been my mistake. The trappings of genre, tropes, and themes may, at times, hide the meat of the thing – and that meat is the only way to leave the table of text feeling full.