Starved for Wholeness
on storytelling beyond crisis, and why tension isn’t enough
It was a humid Friday evening, and we’d gathered with family to celebrate my nephew’s birthday. After the celebration, the adults drifted toward the screened porch. But I lingered in the kitchen, where my teenage niece stood at the counter, slicing herself another piece of cake.
“I have permission,” she said quickly, without turning. “Mom and Dad said it’s okay.”
“I’m not your parent. Do your thing,” I shrugged. I was eyeing seconds myself.
She grinned and relaxed. She’s the eldest of eleven grandkids, by a long shot, and caught in that liminal space between kid and adult. She’s curious, self-assured, and ready to be included. I don’t get much time alone with her, but I like our conversations. She’s sharp and funny and has opinions about everything.
She started in quickly, talking about the books and movies she’s into. I learned about the latest live-action Snow White. I got excited when she told me she was watching a series about high school cheerleaders.
“It’s a documentary?” I asked.
“No, it’s definitely not a documentary,” she said, smirking a little at my eagerness.
Then she launched into a passionate breakdown of a book turned movie. The short of it: she loved the book, but loathed the movie.
“The book,” she said, “is layered.” Funny. Complicated. Slow, and yes, scary. “But the movie is just all scary.”
She noticed that some of the scariest scenes in the film don’t even exist in the book—they were added, she said, to heighten the tension. “I get it. The scary is the substance,” she reflected.
But what she said next stuck with me: that the funny and the mundane parts of the book—the little details left out in the film version—were, in her words, the soul. And without them, the movie felt hollow.
That idea hit me in the way we think about representing real people’s stories. I’m not against the scary, the crises, the drama. I’m not against tension or conflict—it’s often what makes a story hold. Conflict is human, but it’s not the whole human. It shouldn’t be the only frame we use to define someone, especially in nonfiction. Yes, we need stakes. Yes, we need structure. But where is the soul?
Where do we find the parts that make a person feel real? Humor. Relief. Relaxation. Misunderstandings. Small mishaps. Simple frustrations. A glance, a laugh. Tripping on an uneven sidewalk and the reaction that follows. These aren’t distractions from the story—they are the soul of the story. They’re how we see a person in their fullness.
What my niece was pointing to is the same instinct I’ve seen in our industry, and in our culture more broadly. Entertainment doesn’t always value characters outside their crisis. And lately, I’ve noticed my niece isn’t the only one raising this kind of concern (which by the way could be said about many book to movie adaptations).
There’s a growing critique of shows like The Bear, where the spectacle of tension starts to crowd out the story’s deeper emotional core.
One reviewer put it plainly:
“We’re just supposed to infer that Carmy has been building internally toward a decision...through the many scenes he spends wistfully staring off into space, soundtracked by maudlin dad rock.”
The Bear prioritizes scenes to heighten the drama, without doing the narrative work of showing us who these characters really are - the soul has been left on the cutting room floor.
And I’d take that a step further: we tend to look at our own lives the same way. Our lives are not starved for tension; we’re starved for wholeness.
We live in a culture obsessed with problems. We glorify the challenge. We over-identify with the struggle. While we go around looking for problems to call out, companies profit from our fears. Every flaw becomes a sales funnel. Have an issue? Great. Here’s a product to fix it.
It’s everywhere. Just the other day I read a Substack post about how to grow your audience. It told me I needed to focus on “pain points” and offer “problem-solving value.” I’m so over this advice. Why have we become so arrogant to believe we have the solution for anyone else’s problems? I write because I need to; it helps me process my own life. And maybe a few people in the world—maybe you—find it helpful or just worth sitting with for a minute.
But I think that’s the trap: this belief that everything we do must be useful in the most capitalist sense of the word. Must produce an outcome to an external conflict. That you’re only helping if you’re producing outward results. If you’re not working on yourself, you’re working on others. And either way, you’re working…constantly.
But real care, and real storytelling, isn’t always productive. Sometimes it looks like standing beside someone and not making sense of it.
There’s a pattern in how we talk about problems, and it bleeds into how we talk about people. Especially in documentary film, there’s an unspoken formula: find the issue, name the crisis, build a character arc around it.
When applying for grants, we’re expected to define the urgency in clinical terms in what is called a “topic summary,” which lays bare the stakes, the trauma, the devastation. The more broken it sounds, the more worthy of attention.
It often feels like a competition for misery. A quiet film without obvious stakes or villains around every corner is harder to sell. On the opposite end of the spectrum are feel-good films—films about people and their animal friends or quaint little farms. But I don’t always want to tell stories about what’s broken, or solely focus on the happiness. And maybe neither do you.
In the editing room, I’ve received notes mid-stream from funders asking, “Where is the story?”—but what they’re really asking for is the problem. The drama. The conflict that fits within a particular arc. I get it. I do. But can’t drama also be understated, unsaid, beneath the surface? Can’t it be a quiet look, a pause, a silence? Isn’t that actually more nonfiction—more like life—than the spectacle of scare?
To my niece’s point, I keep thinking: Where is the soul in our stories of tragedies writ large?
I think that’s part of why I’ve grown tired—not of storytelling itself, but of the performance of impact in nonfiction. Of the expectation that every film must map neatly onto a known crisis. That every scene must justify itself in terms of utility.
So no, I don’t always want to just tell (or watch) stories about what’s broken or scary—because even if that’s part of the story, it’s not the whole story. Sometimes I want to tell stories about who and what is still standing in the face of the conflict.
Speaking of problem-solving (haha)… I’m currently trying to figure out the future of this Substack.
I originally started it to help me write a book — and it’s definitely been helpful for me. But I’m not totally sure how helpful I’ve been to you in this space.
So! I’d love to hear your thoughts in this very brief (and anonymous) survey. It’ll take 2–3 minutes tops.
Your feedback will help shape where this project goes next. Thank you 💛
The amount of mmmmhmmmmm-Ing I do while reading your columns is wild. Keep it up pls
Really enjoyed this!