A narrative, at its simplest, is a story. Doctors listen to and tell stories every day. At morning report, on rounds, at case conferences, while taking a patient's history in clinic and when signing out in the evenings, stories are told, revised, and retold. These narratives are the foundations of clinical practice and the currency of patientphysician and physician-physician relationships.Neurologists are the custodians of speech and language within the medical community. We study, examine, and characterize speech and language and can diagnose pathology based on their aberrations. Not only do details and subtle nuances frequently make the diagnosis, but how the patient tells a story, including word choice, sentence structure, and prosody, takes on clinical significance. Neurology is one of the few specialties in which the patient's history has retained its value despite increasingly sophisticated diagnostic technology.More can be gained from a patient's story than dry facts placed in a sequential pattern. Absorbing, interpreting, and responding to a patient's narrative require a special skill set. These skills, called "narrative competence" by narrative scholars, include those that are practical, such as recognizing a story's structure and appreciating metaphors and illusions, those that are creative, such as envisioning multiple endings, and those that are emotional, such as feeling empathy and recognizing a story's mood.1 By developing narrative competence, physicians can better understand a patient's experience and thereby be better equipped to help him or her.