Are you a storyteller?

Novelist Dennis Lehane's advice to aspiring writers who attend creative writing programs:

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you’re capable of and making your words symphonic. But, I worry that writing programs spend too much time on the words and not enough on the story. Faulkner understood story, but he had such astounding technical skill he could seem to abandon it and no one would care. But most students don’t have that staggering degree of technical ability, so they should learn to tell a story first. That’s what it is at the end of the day — storytelling. So my best piece of advice to aspiring novelists — after “Read” — would be, “Don’t think of yourselves as writers; think of yourselves as storytellers.” It removes the pretension and the self-consciousness and a boatload of anxiety.