I read it. Four times. I finally quit because I couldn’t figure out what the author was after. A feeling? A sense of accomplishment? Or entitlement, believing she was smarter than the other people in the room, namely her readership. Why would someone tell a story and highlight the most boring parts, the sections that read like a visit to the dentist for a root canal?

This was roughly two pages into her paper.

The ontological framework through which narrative constructs its meaning is, at its most fundamental level, a negotiation between the authorial intent and the interpretive capacity of the reader. This negotiation, which scholars have long understood to be a dialectical process, presupposes a shared epistemological vocabulary that, when absent, renders the text inaccessible to all but the most academically prepared audience. It is within this tension that literature finds both its greatest challenge and its most enduring relevance.

One must consider, when approaching the question of what constitutes effective storytelling, the broader sociocultural matrix from which any given narrative emerges. The story does not exist in isolation. Rather, it participates in an ongoing conversation with the traditions that precede it, the ideological conditions that surround it, and the reader’s own subjective positioning within a complex web of lived experience and culturally conditioned expectation. To ignore this is to misunderstand the very nature of the form.

It is therefore incumbent upon the serious reader to approach each text not as a passive recipient of information but as an active co-constructor of meaning. The implications of this are significant and far-reaching. When we fail to engage with a narrative on these terms, we are not simply misreading it. We are, in a very real sense, refusing the fundamental contract that literature extends to us — a contract written not in ink, but in the accumulated weight of human understanding itself.

I think I would’ve highlighted the whole thing.

I gave up. And then I thought, what would happen if I rewrote it? If I took the same ideas and wove them into something simpler? Would it still fall flat? Or would it work?

For me, every story has meaning, and figuring out that meaning depends on the writer and the reader meeting somewhere in the middle. Stories are bigger than the teller — your job as a reader is to find where you fit inside them.

Same ideas. Two sentences.

I read all of my own writing aloud. If it doesn’t work in the air? It doesn’t work on the page. Try reading her three paragraphs out loud. Your mouth gives up way before the sentence does.

Because I’m a storyteller, I’d rather read the simple version. Communication isn’t a game of codebreaking. It’s feeling the author’s intent.

And if the storyteller does their job right?

You will.