A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

As someone who, from time to time, considers himself a writer, it’s nice sometimes to hear someone I respect a great deal address the ins and outs the details of the writing trade.

I’ve read all but one of Donald Miller’s books in the past few years, but A Million Miles in a Thousand Years was a bit of a different journey than the others. Miller’s normal style is to meander through a loosely-related collection of thoughts and ideas as a way to talk about a few epiphanies he’s had about how to live life fully. In Million Miles, he does this, but through a different lens: how to write a good story.

The book starts out with Don meeting with a couple guys who want to turn his biggest seller, Blue Like Jazz, into a movie. So he goes off to, in essence, edit his own life from a disorganized series of thoughts into a story that’s worth putting on the screen.

In this process, he realizes that, in his 30s, single, childless and without many accomplishments aside from writing a couple books, he has not been writing his own story well. Not the one for the movie, but his actual life.

So, as he is explaining to us, the reader, how to tell a good story, we see him growing and evolving into a person who writes a good story of a life. I won’t spoil it, even though it’s only sort of a story, but I will say that the place that Miller came to by the end of this book were an impressive array of accomplishments that are the mini-stories that make up a good story, from start to finish.

As always, Miller is a quick and easy read, but that makes books like his all the more enjoyable. It’s effortless to get right into the ideas he’s expressing without the language or headiness getting in the way. I sped through A Million Miles, soaking up what it means to live a good story: learning to see obstacles as turning points that shouldn’t be shied away from; seeking out and creating challenging goals to push yourself forward when life becomes monotonous; learning the value of taking risks; realizing that the joy of life is found in trials and journeys, not where those trials and journeys end.

I wouldn’t say this is a book about writers for writers, but it does open up to the basic ideas of story, while reminding us that, in order to enjoy life, we need to engage ourselves in it and actually live.