Recently I read the book Donald Miller’s book: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (this is an affiliate link, but I urge you to Google it rather than brush me off if you don’t like that).

I highly encourage the quick read! It helped me tremendously in my aspirations as a fiction writer but also gave some really neat life perspectives. I thought I would just share all my highlights throughout the book here.

If you like the advice here, click here afterward to get a copy of the advice in action in my short story, The Inheritance!

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

• “If it was a good movie, the experience felt like somebody was resetting a compass in my brain so I could feel what was important in life and what wasn’t.”

My Uncle’s Funeral and a Wedding

• “Characters have to face their greatest fears with courage. That’s what makes a story good.”
• “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.”

The Elements of a Meaningful Life

• “Good stories don’t happen by accident, I learned. They are planned.”
• “A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it”

Writing the World

• “We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we’re given — it’s just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving in over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral.”
• “If I have a hope, it’s that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you.”

Imperfect if Perfect

• “Create a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it”
• “We think stories are about getting money and security, but the truth is, it all comes down to relationships.”

You’ll be Different at the End

• “And if story is derived from real life, if story is just a condensed version of life, then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another.”
• “He said we think we are the same person, but we aren’t. People get stuck, thinking they are one kind of person, but they aren’t.”

A Character is What he Does

• “The stories we tell ourselves are very different from the stories we tell the world”

Saving the Cat

• “Unless he does something good, the audience won’t want things to work out for him, and they’ll lose interest in your story.”

Listen to Your Writer

• “I admitted something other than me was showing a better way. And when I did this, I realized the Voice, the Writer who was not me, was trying to make a better story, a more meaningful series of experiences I could live through.”
• “[God] came back to me and asked me If I really believed he could write a better story — and if I did, why didn’t I trust him? I didn’t have an answer to that question. Why didn’t I trust God?”

How to Make Yourself Write a Better Story

• “A lot of people think a writer has to live in order to write, has to meet people and have a rich series of experiences or his work will become dull. But that is drivel. It’s an excuse a writer uses to take the day off, or the week or the month off for that matter.”
• “She says most of what a writer needs to really live they can find in a book. People who live good stories are too busy to write about them.”
• “Characters don’t really choose to move. They have to be forced.”

An Inciting Incident

• “The great stories go to those who don’t give in to fear”
• “But fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.”

Pointing Towards the Horizon

• “I could point toward any major character and say exactly what that person wanted. No character had a vague ambition.”

Negative Turns

• “I believe God wants us to create beautiful stories”
• “It is when people do not allow God to show up through them, she realized, that the world collapses in on itself.”

A Good story, Hijacked

• “The average American encounters three thousand commercial messages each day”
• “A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling the people around us what we think is important.”

A Practice Story

• “The more painful the journey to Machu Picchu, the more the traveler would appreciate the city, once he got there.”
• “And it was like Carlos said, because you can take a bus to Machu Picchu; you can take a train and then a bus, and you can hike a mile to the Sun Gate. But the people who took the bus didn’t experience the city as we experienced the city. The pain made the city more beautiful. The story made us different characters than we would have been if we had skipped the story and showed up at the ending an easier way.”
• “It made me think about the hard lives so many people have had, the sacrifices they’ve endured, and how those people will see heaven differently from those of us who have had easier lives.”

Meeting Bob

• “Sharing a story with somebody made the story more meaningful.”
• “You’ll realize when you organize your life into the structure of story. You’ll get a taste for one story and then want another, and then another, and the stories will build until you’re living a kind of epic of risk and reward, and the whole thing will be molding you into the actual character whose roles you’ve been playing.”
• “You can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.”
• “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 ambition had to be sacrificial. The protagonist has to be going through pain, risking his very life, for the sake of somebody else.”
• “I wondered at all this exposition God had created, as though it were an invitation to an epic so grand it might match the scenery. The mountains themselves call us into greater stories, I thought.”
• “The main way we learn story is not through movies or books; it’s through each other”
• “But Bob convinced them that his children might learn more interviewing the president of Paraguay than by reading a book about him”
• “Bob and Maria’s kids, now grown and in high school and college, each have a quiet dignity and confidence. They also have an informal charm, as though they just know they would like us if we’d take the time to get to know each other. It is obvious they’d played the roles in the story their family was living, the roles of foreign dignitaries, traveling with their parents on the important assignment of asking world leaders what they hope in. Their story had given them their character.”
• “Bob seemed uncomfortable with the idea he was anything special. But he wanted to answer my question, so he thought about it and said he didn’t think we should be afraid to embrace whimsy.”
• “He said it’s that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks.”

The Thing About a Crossing

• “The reward you get from a story is always less than you thought it would be, and the work is harder than you imagined. The point of a story is never about the ending, remember. It’s about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle.”
• “It didn’t matter that I had a condo back home or a bed, because you become the character in the story you are living”
• “But they got 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.”
• Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it’s conflict that changes a person.”
• “You can either get bitter or better. I chose to get better. It’s made all the difference.”

The Pain Will Bind Us

• “Part of me wonder if our stories aren’t being stolen by the easy life.”

A Tree in a Story About a Forest

• “Amid the absurdity of human suffering, still had meaning. Suffering, as absurd as it seemed, pointed to a greater story in which, if one would only construe himself as a character within, he could find fulfillment in his tragic role, knowing the plot was heading toward redemption.”
• “Misery, though seemingly ridiculous, indicates life itself has the potential of meaning, and therefore pain itself must also have meaning. Contrary to Freud’s posit that man’s greatest pursuit is of pleasure, Frankl argued life is a pursuit of meaning itself”

The Reason God Hasn’t Fixed You Yet

• “It’s written in the fabric of our DNA that life used to be beautiful and now it isn’t, and if only this and if only that, it would be beautiful again.”
• “The reason Danes are so happy was this: they had low expectations”
• “It’s hard to imagine how a religion steeped in so much pain and sacrifice turned into a promise for earthly euphoria.”
• “I think Jesus can make things better, but I don’t think he is going to make things perfect. Not here, and not now.”
• “What I love about the true gospel of Jesus, though, is that it offers hope. Paul has hope our soul will be made complete. It will happen in heaven, where there will be a wedding and a feast. I wonder if that’s why so many happy stories end in weddings and feasts. Paul says Jesus is the hope that will not disappoint. I find that comforting. That helps me get through the day, to be honest. It even makes me content somehow. Maybe that’s what Paul meant when he said he’d learned the secret of contentment.”
• “She said she and her husband believed they were a cherished prize for each other, and they would probably drive any other people mad…She said she had married a guy, and he was just a guy. He wasn’t going to make all her problems go away, because he was just a guy. And that freed her to really love him as a guy, not as an ultimate problem solver.”
• “I’m trying to be more Danish, I guess. And the thing is, it works. When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you’d be surprised at how much pleasure you get in material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you’d be surprised how much you like spending time with God.”

Great Stories Have Memorable Scenes

• “What memorable scenes do is punctuate the existing rise and fall of a narrative.”
• “I think God wanted his people to build altars for their sake, something that would help them remember, something they could look back on and remember the time when they were rescued, or they were given grace.”

All you Have to do is Try

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

To Speak Something into Nothing

• “He bought the land because the kids loved the water, and they’d asked their dad if they could have a boat. Bob and Maria couldn’t afford a boat and a house, so they bought the land, put a port-a-potty on it, and lived in tents for two years, so they could afford to have a boat. It was one of the happiest times of their lives, Bob said.”
• “A good storyteller doesn’t just tell a better story, though. He invites other people into the story with him, giving them a better story too”

Summer Snow in Delaware

• “Each snowflake bore the scars of its journey.”

Where Once There was Nothing

• “William Zinsser says that writers ‘love to have written’”
• “Lucy doesn’t read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just is a dog.”
• “It makes me wonder if that was the intention for man, to chase sticks and ducks, to name animals, to create families, and keep looking back at God to feed off his pleasure at our pleasure.”
• “It’s as though God is saying, Write a good story, take somebody with you, and let me help”

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This post was previously published on Writers’ Blokke.

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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:

Escape the Act Like a Man Box

What We Talk About When We Talk About Men

Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race

The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow

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