I found myself going through something of an identity crisis when a Canadian fantasy and science-fiction author I had never heard of before, named Tanya Huff, commented on X about my recent blog post describing my trip to Lahti: “Your storytelling is impressive. Congratulations. I have just followed you, and I hope we can connect as fellow creatives.” I am sometimes a little suspicious when I receive this kind of feedback from people who would hardly be expected to follow the genre of literature represented by my blog. But, assuming the feedback was sincere, I found myself pondering Tanya’s choice of word: storytelling.

As I understand it, the word was not meant negatively. It did not mean that the commenter regarded my nonfiction books about eschatology as fiction or invented fairy tales—whatever she may have thought of their subject matter. Rather, it suggested that I had managed to create a story in my blog post that intrigued a new reader enough to keep her reading all the way to the end. This was a somewhat new and strange concept to me, because I have never thought of myself as a storyteller.

In my entire life, I may have read no more literary novels than I can count on one hand. One reason may be that I am far more interested in reality than in fiction. The only fiction that interested me as a child was Disney duck comics written and drawn by Don Rosa. Perhaps that was because Rosa filled his stories with references to real events, real places and real history.

In one fascinating adventure, the Ducks travelled around the world and through the whole sweep of world history in search of the lost Library of Alexandria, only to end up back in Duckburg, where the lost library was discovered directly beneath Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. Stories like that were tremendously exciting to the mind of a twelve-year-old boy.

That is also why the storage room in my father’s childhood home—where my family moved when I was that age—felt like a treasure trove when I found decades-old Donald Duck magazines and nearly all of Rosa’s fifteen-year body of work there. I can still remember the suspicious looks I received at the library when I went there to print stacks of Don Rosa’s duck drawings from the internet. It was a peculiar hobby when other children my age were doing something more “normal”—such as playing ice hockey.

My mother, too, was baffled when, instead of wanting new clothes on our visits to Tampere, I insisted on being taken to second-hand bookshops to hunt for Rosa’s comics. I did read books as well as comics, but mostly tinfoil-hat conspiracy literature about the Freemasons and the Illuminati, and prophecy books about the rapidly approaching end of the world. I know. A slightly odd child. Perhaps he already had a screw or two loose. But those strange obsessions eventually produced an author named Samuel Tuominen.

Whether I still have a screw or two loose is, of course, for the reader to decide. That is not what I intend to investigate in this blog post. I am much more interested in when I became a storyteller, or what that even means. I used to think that my life was so uneventful and uninteresting that even the most skilful storyteller could hardly fashion it into a particularly gripping tale.

This is well illustrated by an amusing anecdote from years ago, when I was still at the beginning of my writing career. My two older brothers came to visit and began making what they considered hilarious jokes at my expense:

—Mika, can you sense the same atmosphere of stagnation in here that I can?

—Of course. Even all the objects are in exactly the same places as when I last visited about two weeks ago. It’s as though time doesn’t pass here at all.

And as proof that my flat had indeed passed through some kind of time warp governed by Einsteinian physics, they lifted my coffee cup from the table, to which it had already partly adhered. My brothers apparently interpreted this as empirical evidence that my home lay within some kind of space-time anomaly. Over the course of two weeks, the coffee cup’s displacement Δx had remained approximately zero while time in the outside world had advanced normally. Besides general relativity, an alternative hypothesis has been proposed: the occupant was simply too idle to clean up after himself. Unfortunately, the latter theory has considerably stronger empirical evidence behind it.

From an outside observer’s perspective, time in my flat had nearly stopped. The same flat, the same things and apparently even the same coffee cup in the same place, week after week. But perhaps Einstein would have offered my brothers an entirely different explanation. According to special relativity, time slows as an object’s velocity increases. Perhaps my time had not stopped because I was going nowhere, but because I was moving so damn fast that nobody else could keep up.

The coffee cup’s velocity relative to the table was indisputably zero. My brothers took no measurements, however, of the speed of the thoughts of the man who was rather slow to wash it. Nor could they have measured the potential energy stored in that outwardly motionless life.

An author, after all, is not born in a vacuum. The energy that eventually drives a person to produce millions of words over a lifetime has to come from somewhere. In my case, it did not arise from a particularly fast-paced and eventful life. Perhaps quite the opposite. With little movement directed towards the outer world, energy accumulated in the inner one: in reading, thinking, imagining, questioning and an endless need to understand how things are connected.

Perhaps storytelling is something like this. At first, it might be difficult to imagine how a fantasy author named Tanya Huff, Don Rosa, a coffee cup and Einstein could possibly be connected. But perhaps a good storyteller knows how to bind seemingly unrelated things together in some peculiar way, finding the thread that creates a meaningful narrative arc between them.

Perhaps storytelling also means that a writer turns a concrete event, experience or observation into a window onto something much larger. A coffee cup stuck to a table is, in itself, merely a dirty coffee cup. In a story, however, it can become an image of an entire period of life that looked motionless from the outside even though something was constantly happening beneath the surface. A good story may not require its protagonist to resemble Scrooge McDuck in Rosa’s comics, visiting twenty countries in search of a lost treasure.

The protagonist can spend years at the same table and still travel in his mind through thousands of years and entire civilisations. A lack of external events does not mean that nothing is happening in the inner world. Sometimes the most interesting journey in a life story is not from one place to another, but the way the same person gradually comes to see himself and the surrounding world differently over the years. An eventful life does not automatically make a good life story, and an uneventful life does not make a bad one. A story is born only from what the events mean.

Let us consider two people, X and Y. X travels around the world, encounters new people and cultures, and continually faces fresh turns in life. Meanwhile, Y sits at home all day without even his coffee cup moving. Yet to a reader, both lives would make equally dull reading if recounted as a simple linear chronology:

X’s biography:

In 2004, X moved to London. The following year, he travelled to India, where he spent three months. From India, he continued to Thailand and met his future wife there. In 2007, they moved to New York. X found a new job there. Their first child was born in 2009. In 2011, the family moved back to Europe. In 2013, X climbed Kilimanjaro. In 2015, he divorced his wife and moved to Australia. There he learned to surf. In 2017, he founded a company. In 2019, the company went bankrupt. In 2020, he moved back to London.

Y’s biography:

On Monday, Y woke at ten and made coffee. He sat down at his computer and checked his email. On Tuesday, he did more or less the same thing. On Wednesday, he went to the shops. On Thursday, he forgot his coffee cup on the table. On Friday, it was still there. Much the same happened the following week. In 2011, the coffee cup was replaced.

I suspect that most people’s lives would make rather dull reading if we merely reported how our days unfold one after another. A good storyteller, however, knows how to find some seemingly insignificant concrete memory, event or detail from life and build a much larger narrative meaning around it: Why did this happen? Why had the coffee cup been left on the table? Did it perhaps lead to something life-changing?

Incidentally, this is one reason why AI-generated text still cannot fully replace text written by a human being. AI has no lived life. No experiences. No memories. It can certainly be made to imitate narrative writing, but the result is often a hollow, averaged-out imitation that somehow sounds soulless and inauthentic.

It can invent a coffee cup forgotten on a table. It can also invent symbolic meaning for it. But it cannot remember the moment when my two brothers actually stood in my flat laughing at its stagnant atmosphere. It does not remember the tone of their voices or how their remarks made me feel at the time. Still less can it look back on the same event fifteen years later and find a meaning in it that even I did not see when it happened.

Meaning arises from experiences that AI does not possess. Meaning also arises from our willingness to appear imperfect and vulnerable before the reader—from our willingness to share embarrassing things about our lives, such as our lack of motivation to wash the dishes. If I presented only a polished image of myself, nobody would believe it. And since we are making embarrassing confessions, I should admit that I do use AI as an assistant in my writing. That applies to this blog post as well. For even if AI cannot tell the story, it can suggest better ways of writing it and help shape the prose into a smoother and more coherent linguistic structure.

Although I have not thought of myself as a storyteller, I have understood the importance of narrative for quite some time. In fact, this is probably why I first became interested in history and prophecy. I said at the beginning that I have read only a handful of novels. One of the most memorable was Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, a crime thriller interesting enough that I went on to read the 1982 nonfiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (Jonathan Cape, 1982). Brown based his 2003 bestselling novel on that book’s pseudohistorical ideas about the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and Ron Howard directed the film adaptation of the same name in 2006.

As a Christian, I naturally did not embrace the novel’s unorthodox theological ideas, whose alleged historical basis has rightly been criticised as pseudohistory. What fascinated me, perhaps, was precisely the way Brown turned history into narrative. In his novel, history was not merely a series of dates, people and disconnected events. It was a mystery stretching across the centuries, in which events from the past served as clues to a far greater story. The tale even had a clear villain: the Roman Church, which, in Brown’s fictional history, had spent centuries trying to conceal the truth about the alleged bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Even the most iconic works of Renaissance art became historical clues in this narrative. Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper was no longer merely a depiction of Jesus’ final meal with his disciples; in Brown’s world it contained a hidden clue about Mary Magdalene. Even the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa seemed to suggest that Leonardo knew something the rest of the world did not.

From a historian’s perspective, it is of course easy to shoot holes in such claims. From the perspective of storytelling, however, they are irresistibly effective. Brown made the reader look at a familiar painting and ask: What if I have looked at this all my life without understanding what I am actually seeing?

Later, I read Philip J. Sampson’s fascinating nonfiction book 6 Modern Myths About Christianity & Western Civilization. Even the chapter titles stayed with me: Galileo: A Story of a Hero of Science, Darwin: A Story of Origins, The Environment: A Story of Mastery, and so on. Sampson’s central observation was that we do not view the past merely through isolated historical facts. We build stories out of them—stories that also tell us who we are and how we arrived at the present world.

The problem is that a good story is not necessarily the same thing as good history. Reality is messy, contradictory and full of details that do not fit neatly into any plot. Narrative, by contrast, wants heroes and villains, causes and consequences, and preferably some kind of moral. That is why it is tempting to cut away the complexity of history until only a tale that reinforces our worldview remains.

Sampson uses Galileo as a good example. In the popular account, Galileo becomes a courageous hero of reason and science, standing alone against a superstitious, anti-scientific Church. The problem is not that there was no serious conflict between Galileo and ecclesiastical authorities, but that the simple roles in this retrospective drama obscure a much messier historical reality. That is precisely why the story is so persistent: it does not merely tell us about Galileo. It tells us how we want to see science, religion and our own modern society.

The point, however, is not that viewing history as narrative is inherently problematic. We often look at the past only through the ready-made—and sometimes badly distorted—narratives of our own age. At the same time as I was reading Sampson’s well-sourced academic book, I was also constructing my own eschatological narrative of history. The result of years of research was my first book, the unpublished 700-page Muhammad, Charlemagne and the Antichrist, completed in December 2014.

The title itself contained the book’s fundamental narrative mystery: how could the Prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam; Charlemagne, the first pope-crowned Roman emperor; and the Antichrist, the end-times embodiment of evil in biblical eschatology, be connected? And could following these historical and prophetic clues ultimately lead all the way to Charles III as the personification of that final Antichrist?

The study of biblical prophecy is, at its heart, the act of seeing history as a great story—not as a collection of disconnected, random and meaningless events. A historian can explain the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire through the migrations of Germanic peoples, the empire’s internal crises, economic problems and numerous other historical causes. A Christian who studies prophecy can accept all those explanations while seeing another level behind them: the Roman Empire was destined to break apart in the manner described by the prophecies of Daniel 2 and 7.

The historian asks: What happened, and why? The eschatologist asks something deeper still: What does this mean, and where is all this going? In the latter question, history changes from chronology into story. Babylon does not simply rise and fall, after which Persia happens to take its place. Persia is not merely followed by Greece and Greece by Rome. In the Book of Daniel, these empires are placed within a single historical drama with a beginning, a developing arc and an endpoint. Past, present and future belong to the same story.

The eschatologist tries to look beneath the surface of historical events in order to find history’s great metaphysical metanarrative. He tries to discern the prophetic-historical pattern that might reveal how or when our present age will end or reach its historical climax. He asks questions that few others would ask, such as: “What do the histories of the Roman Church and Islam, Donald Trump’s two presidential terms, the accession of Charles III, the war with Iran, or the development of artificial intelligence mean prophetically?”

And if we can decipher the prophetic meaning of these events, perhaps we can also see the direction in which history ought to proceed. Admittedly, a student of prophecy may often draw premature or overly hasty conclusions from world events. He is rather like a traveller trying to determine his location with an old map. The mountain peak looks familiar, the river bends in the right direction and the city on the horizon appears to stand exactly where the map says it should. The more landmarks that line up, the more convinced the traveller becomes that he knows where he is—and, above all, what should be waiting around the next bend.

The problem arises when one landmark does not fit the map. A poor map-reader easily begins shifting the mountain a few miles to the left in his mind instead of asking whether he himself has misread the map. For a Christian, then, the problem may not lie in the prophetic map but in the map-reader’s ability to locate himself. Biblical prophecy may be entirely correct while my interpretation of where Donald Trump, Charles III, Iran or artificial intelligence belong on the map may be entirely wrong.

In this sense, the eschatologist is simultaneously a historian, a detective and a map-reader. Before him lies a body of historical material spanning thousands of years, while in his other hand he holds a prophetic map whose symbols he is trying to match to the terrain. He searches for recurring patterns, follows clues and tries to infer from them where in the story we are presently living. Reading that map correctly therefore requires precisely the ability to perceive narratives. It requires seeing history as a whole, in which an individual event derives its meaning from its relationship to what happened before and what ought to happen afterwards.

A single war, revolution, royal accession or technological breakthrough says very little prophetically in itself. What matters is where the event may belong within the larger story. Here, perceiving narratives differs from merely inventing connections. A good detective asks not only how two clues might be connected, but whether there are sufficient grounds for connecting them. Otherwise every coincidence becomes a clue, every great figure in history an Antichrist candidate and every new technological invention the mark of the beast.

Narrative thinking therefore requires two apparently opposing abilities. The first is imagination: the ability to see connections where others see only isolated events. The second is restraint: the ability to refrain from making a connection when the evidence cannot support it. Perhaps the question in the title of this blog post is based on a false dichotomy. Perhaps I am not a nonfiction author or a storyteller, but both. The nonfiction author in me tries to establish what really happened and what the available evidence allows us to conclude. The storyteller, in turn, asks what those events mean, how they relate to one another and what larger whole they form.

But my coffee cup is once again waiting on the table for someone to wash it, so I will leave these reflections here and take my turn at the sink. I have just remembered, however, that Don Rosa wrote a story called On Stolen Time, which played with the idea of time standing still. I think I will read that first and wash the coffee cup afterwards. Maybe.