Oct

12

A Million Miles… by Donald Miller

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A Million Miles“Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.” — Donald Miller

I couldn’t put this book down. Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life, should be required reading for anybody wanting to live a meaningful life. I can’t remember the last time I cried while reading a book. This could have more to do with the types of books I read, but A Million Miles moved me. Deeply.

The book is about looking at life—my life—as a story. What makes a good story? What stories do people want to be a part of? What stories do we ignore? What stories are worth living?

My highlights from A Million Miles:

“But nobody really remembers easy stories. Characters have to face their greatest fears with courage. That’s what makes a story good. If you think about the stories you like most, they probably have lots of conflict. There is probably death at stake, inner death or actual death, you know. These polar charges, these happy and sad things in life, are like colors God uses to draw the world.”

“When we watch the news, we grieve all of this, but when we go to the movies, we want more of it. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.”

“If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.”

“A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it is the basic structure of a good story.”

“The point of life is character transformation.”

“The idea that a character is what he does remains the hardest to actually live.”

“A general rule in creating stories is that characters don’t want to change. They must be forced to change.”

“Robert McKee says humans naturally seek comfort and stability. Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won’t enter into a story. They have to get fired from their job or be forced to sign up for a marathon. A ring has to be purchased. A home has to be sold. The character has to jump into the story, into the discomfort and the fear, otherwise the story will never happen.”

“It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.”

“‘Why would the Incas make people take the long route?’ my friend from Alabama asked. ‘Because the emperor knew,’ Carlos said, ‘the more painful the journey to Machu Picchu, the more the traveler would appreciate the city, once he got there.’”

A story goes to the next level with two key elements, and both of them have to do with the ambition of the character. First, he said, is the thing a character wants must be very difficult to attain. The more difficult, the better the story. The reason the story is better when the ambition is difficult, Steve said, is because there is more risk, and more risk makes the story question more interesting to an audience. The greatest stories, Steve told me, are the ones in which the character’s very life is at stake. There needs to be a question as to whether the character will make it, whether he will defeat the enemy or the enemy will defeat him. The second element that makes a story epic, he said, was the ambition had to be sacrificial. The protagonist has to be going through pain, risking his very life, for the sake of somebody else. “Those stories are gold,” Steve said. “You can ask people to name their favorite movies, and those two elements will be in almost all of them.”

“And if your friends are living boring stories, you probably will too.”

“The truth is, we are all living out the character of the roles we have played in our stories.”

“I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can’t see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story.”

“’Writing a story isn’t about making your peaceful fantasies come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn’t think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it’s conflict that changes a person.’ His voice was like thunder now. ‘You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That’s the only way we change.’”

“But Victor Frankl whispered in my ear all the same. He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.”

“I’ve let go of the idea that this life has a climax.”

“It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.”