Eugene Peterson on good storytelling

"Good storytellers, by enlisting our imaginations, tease us into participation in the story they tell. When storytelling is good we pulled into a world that is both truer and larger then the one we ordinarily occupy;but it is not an alien world. (The exception is escapist entertainment that deliberately falsifies by depersonalizing and manipulating reality--horror stories, harlequin romances, pornography, propaganda.) Good storytelling involves us in what has been sitting right in front of us for years but we hadn't noticed or hadn't thought was impotent or hadn't thought had anything to do with us. Without leaving the world in which we daily work and sleep and play, we find ourselves in a far larger world; we embrace connections and meaning and significance in our lives far beyond what our employers and teachers, our parents and children, our friends and neighbors have told us, to say nothing of what is conveyed by the experts and celebrities with whom we anxiously surround ourselves."

-Eugene Peterson, pg 47-48 of Eat this Book