You are an expert at storytelling.

Maybe it doesn't roll off your tongue super smoothly. Maybe you're not the best most articulate movie critic,

but you have consumed so much story that your brain,

your innermost parts of your brain, your subconscious even knows the difference between good storytelling and bad storytelling.

If a character is unrelated, you just intuit that.

If the pacing of a story isn't right, something feels off to you and maybe sometimes you look at these things and you can even technically point to what isn't working about the story at any given time with a story that doesn't work.

This is just one of those things

that you get good at when you've been around it for a long time and what have you been

around more than stories? Well one of the things you've probably noticed or at least

intuitive about the way good stories work is that almost all of them

that follow a main character from point A to point Z of the story.

Start out by getting us, the audience familiarized with the character and the

characters environment and the characters circumstances in the

early going. And then, at about the 15% mark, we get a sense of what the character is going to be doing.

The Gospel of Matthew works the same way. At about the 15% mark, we have a sense of what the

kingdom is and that Jesus is apparently a king of some sort and

he's going to make a kingdom of some sort and people are invited somehow and it has values that are different.

It's really hard to conceptualize at this point, but there's your

call to action. There's your now we know what's going on here part of the story.

Usually by about the 20-25% mark you start to get a pretty good sense of what the problem is going to be, who the bad

guy, the enemy, the antagonist is going to be, and you start to develop more questions about how this main character is going to turn out.

You realize that there's more to learn, there's more depth to this main character

...