Suppose somebody wants to make a movie about you. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Except what happens when you realize your life’s so boring it makes for a pretty bad movie? A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life is the true story of how that happens to best-selling author Donald Miller, and what he does to re-write his life into a better story.
Miller is a beautiful writer. The first few chapters had me thinking he was a little whimsical, but his poetry builds into a tour de force deeper into the book. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is a story about stories; what stories are, how they affect us, how we all live stories, how to live a better story, and how better life stories make for better characters. With raw honesty and wit, he tells us the story of his own journey to create a story-worthy life, using the principles of good story-telling to guide him.
Story-telling is real, it’s not a new 7-step product cooked up to making someone rich. The story of story is as old as mankind. We all tell stories. We make sense of our world through story. I’m a writer. I’ve read the classics on story-writing, plot-building and act structure. I never expected someone to weave the elements of story-writing into a book that teaches them to you, while showing you how the author used them to live a better life at the same time, and have it be beautifully written.
And make you think too – Miller’s made me think, really think, about the story of my own life while reading his book. I love how human the story is; Miller’s no superman, he gets things right and gets things wrong too, but manages to find beauty in all of it. It’s not a book that’s all light and glory, he writes about death and suffering also. It helps me relate, and I find the realness inspiring.
To be sure, the book goes into the subject of God and Christianity a fair bit, and that might or might not be your thing. I’m not a Christian, but I was fine with it; the revelations were lovely and relevant all the same.
I loved reading A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. If you want a book that teaches, inspires and challenges you, skip the next self-help book and read this instead.