In each new clinical situation., the occupational therapist must answer the question: What story am I in? To give an answer is to make some initial sense of the situation on which the therapist can act. Discovering an intelligible story is often helped through analogy. Therapists may say to themselves, How is this situation like others I have been in? Or, put narratively, How could I retell, in a new way, an old story? As a way of framing a practical decision about what to do, stories offer an account about what has happened which gives a view of which actions make sense as appropriate next steps. Stories place events within a temporal context and in order to know how to act therapists often need a historical sense which locates them in relation to some past and some anticipated future.

This need for narrative framing as a guide to practice is suggested by a nurse quoted in Benner's study of clinical reasoning in nursing. This nurse, who works in an intensive care nursery, describes what she considers the most essential kind of thinking she wants her newly graduated students to evince at the end of their three-month affiliation with her.