Writing a Beautiful Story

Last Thursday, I drove three hours from my hometown to Santa Rosa Beach to visit my oldest brother, sister-in-law, and their two children. Driving down mostly back roads in the rain, I listened to two podcast by Donald Miller, writer of Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Maybe he's written more, but those are the three that I am most familiar with, though I haven't read Through Painted Deserts yet.

The two podcast were "Love Turns the Light On" and "Telling a Great Love Story," and yes, he talked about "mooshy" things, BUT he mostly talked about writing a beautiful story with your life, a better story (also the central theme in A  Million Miles in a Thousand Years).

I've typed up the first 15 minutes of the first podcast. Take note: you can't hear his tone of voice, but he's incredibly sarcastic and funny.


"I've been looking forward to this for a very long time. There aren't a lot of people who are talking about the importance of purity. In Portland- where I live- it's a pretty Godless city...purity is kind of laughed at which is really incredible to me because what I do for a living is write stories. And if you don't have purity in a story -and not like sexual purity- but like defined boundaries in the context of a story, it gets really muddled.

 Like, if you go to a movie, and you're not exactly sure of what the protagonist wants or who the enemy is, you just get really bored. Right? It's totally true. The next time you get bored in a movie, ask yourself a couple of questions. What did the protagonist want? My guess is you won't know. you're like 'that's why this movie sucks.' And then, like who is the enemy? 'I can't...it might have been the guy with the hat...but I can't...' so when there's not like clear stuff, stuff going on in a story, the story gets really muddled. And it's not just true for stories, it's true for life.

I mean when things, when you don't know what you want or what you stand for, life gets really muddled. And when you really don't know who the enemy is, life gets really muddled. Like when you can't tell who the bad guys are, life doesn't make very much sense, right. Or when you think the bad guys are the good guys, all of that, it just doesn't work.

When I figured this out, I was having coffee with a friend- kind of a hipster guy who spends several hours picking an outfit that makes it look like he doesn't care..haaha, you  know what I mean? ....So, I'm having coffee with my friend, and he kind of blah, blah talking, 'well, you know life is meaningless' and then just keeps going. And I used to hear that  (you could put that on the state flag of Oregon -life is meaningless- and people would just kind of buy it, because that's jut how people kind of think...and that's fine, we've all heard that phrase a million times).

 But I've been studying stories, and I realized 'wait a second, life is not actually meaningless.' If you went to a movie, and the movie was meaningless, and you walked out of the movie, you would say  'you know, that movie was meaningless,' what you wouldn't say is 'all movies are meaningless.' That's just not true. Some movies are really great and exciting, and some movies are just kind of dumb. So when my friend said 'life is meaningless,' I did a very rude thing. I said,

'well, what if life is not meaningless, what if just your life is meaningless...'

so we're not friends anymore.

But it was, it really was kind of a moment when I realized, wait a second, you can make life very meaningful. You can actually have the experience of a very  meaningful life, if you have some very healthy boundaries, if you're a protagonist who knows what they want.

(He goes on to talk about producers who come to him and ask if they can make a movie based off of his nonfiction book, Blue Like Jazz) . They come to town, they sit around my living room, and they say the book would be about you, only you work in a factory. And I'm like, okay, well I never actually worked in a factory. Do you know what I mean? And you could work really hard and work through the conflict to get....but they were just lying. So I was like, let's just make a movie a lie, let's just lie...

So I raise my hand and I'm like, 'well, what's wrong with my real life.'
 and Steve says, 'well Don, you know in screen writing you take certain liberties and make ideas and make things very clean so that audience can understand.'
And the other screenwriter- Ben- looked at Steve and said, 'what Steve is trying to say, Don, is that your real life is too boring to be turned into a movie. You know, we have to change some things.'

And so, I actually thought to myself, 'what if I changed those things in my actual life? I mean, what if like, the stuff that makes up a good story, what if I actually just did that and saw what happened?' Do you know what I mean?

What if like you're sitting in the theater that is your mind- right now- what if you're sitting in the theater of your mind, and you're watching your life happen out of your eye balls, and you're saying to yourself, 'this movie sucks.' Or 'this movie is boring.' What could you do? What could you do to change that, and it turns out that there are actually a lot of things that you can do.

For instance, you can take enormous risks. You can. If you take enormous risk, meaning there's a possibility that you could fail or look like an idiot, your life will get more exciting. Now, it may be a tragedy, and that's unfortunate, but it will get more exciting. Uh, you have to take risks in stories, right?  And the other this is that the protagonist has to want something that is extremely clear. If you don't want something that is clear, like if you wake up in the morning  and you don't know what you want, you are in a boring story. I promise. If you wake up in the morning, and you don't know what you want, you're in the theater of your mind watching a story that makes no sense. OR- here's one- if you want something, but the thing that you want is really stupid, your story makes no sense, well it makes sense, people are just checking out.

So, let me tell you a story, and I'll just make this up. Act one, right. The movie comes on and you see this guy, and he's a young guy. He works in a grocery store, and he flips through this magazine at the grocery store and he sees an advertisement for the new Volvo Station Wagon. And he thinks, 'wow, I want that.' Well,  now we have stuff of story because we have a protagonist that wants something. Now the other thing that has to happen in the story is conflict.

The more conflict, the better the story. Did you know that? The more painful your life is, the more meaningful your life becomes. Doesn't that suck? It's absolutely true. It's absolutely true. How many of you can testify? Seriously, 'I am in an extreme amount of pain, and my life is meaningful, and I hate it.' But, they kind of go hand-in-hand.

So, he want the Volvo, and he realizes, 'it's going to take me three years of working at this grocery store to get the down payment on this Volvo. So the whole movie is him overcoming the conflict of like mopping vomit off  aisle four, right. And after three years, he goes to the dealership, he makes a down payment, and he drives off the car lot in the Volvo. Are you crying at the end of this movie? Just be straight with me. Are you saying to yourself, 'Man, if he can have the Volvo, maybe I can have the Volvo.' No. That movie sucks. It really does. That is a crappy movie. you're literally, an hour an a half in, you're going, 'is this really what this movie is about? He wants a Volvo?'

But we live these stories. These are the stories that we actually live. And then we go, 'life is awful.' No, life is fine, your story is awful. Life is fine, I promise you. It is great. Look around at the mountains, I mean there's a setting that God has made on this planet for you to tell un-freaking-believable stories. You get up tomorrow morning, and you watch the sun rise, and you tell me God did  not design you to live an unbelievable life.

Here's the problem. He gives you the pen, that's what sucks.
He says, 'you write it' or 'lets write it together' is really what He's saying. Lets write it together. I mean, God is a really good Dad, right? So, He's like the dad who gets out the big piece of butcher paper, and gets the crayons out, and He just says, 'what do you want to draw? Like what do you want to do with your life. What do you wanna draw? If you could do anything, what would you want to do?' But He's a good dad, so He doesn't mean like, anything you want- you know what I mean?-

Like conversations with God are like this (they used to be like this):

Don: God, what would thy have me thou do with my life?
God: I'm not an Englishman, I'm not Shakespeare....please don't talk to me that way because you people are creeping me out.
Don: God what does thou want me to do with thy life hither to you?
God: Don, what do you want to do?
Don: God I only want to please you, I am your servant, what would you have...
God. No, no, no, Don. I'm serious. Like, what do you want to do?
Don: No, no, no, God, I only want to please...
God: Like I heard you, for the third time. What do you want to do? Like I put in your heart the ability to desire, so what do you want?
Don: Are you serious?
God: I am dead serious. What do you want to do? Let's do something together.
Don: God, I want to be a photographer at Mardi Gras.
God: No.
Don: You said anything.
God:  I meant, like, you know what I mean, not that. No, hat's immoral  and I know...
Don: It's not immoral, it's just pictu..
God: "I know what you're going to take pictures of. You can't fool me. No. Please, no. I will beat you on the side of the head if you ask me again.

So there's morality, right? There's morality, there's guidelines, there's discipline, there's wisdom. Psychologist talking about in raising healthy children, you have to give the child what is called "shared agency." So you both have power. God gives you some power, He guides you. And there are times, don't get me wrong, when He has a specific Will for you. They're usually kind of seasonal.

Like, 'I want you to do this,' and you feel these things. 'I want you to go do this thing for me.' They're seasonal. But I don't believe God- for most people- has this specific thing that controls their entire life. Now, biblically, we do see some examples of God having a specific Will for a specific person, so we need to create some caveats here. I just want to make sure you're not left out.

 If, biblically, if your donkey talks to you, God has a specific plan for your life. Or, let's just broad categorize this, any household pet, animal, God has a specific plan for your life. If you are a virgin, and you are pregnant, God has a specific plan for your life. You need to see a therapist, and then maybe cool things will happen. But do you see what I'm saying.

And you know what, it's scary. I understand why people want God to have a specific plan for them and not want to take responsibility for the agency that He has given them to live something really beautiful. Because if you do it, if you do take the pen and write a story with God, it's extremely scary. It's so scary, because what if you screw up? I mean, if you screw up and it's His plan, you can go, 'hey, it's His plan...wasn't my plan.'

People will come up to me and say, 'I just believe that God has a very specific plan for my life, and I don't believe that I can just take the pen and say I'm going to write something very beautiful based on what I know about God and my relationship... He has a specific plan'. And I just go:

'Well, what are you doing then?'
'Well I'm waiting....'
'Like for what? What are you waiting for, and  what are you doing while you wait?'
'Well, I'm shopping at Bed, Bath, and Beyond right now.'

So, God's plan for you, His specific plan for you, is to wait, and shop at Bed, Bath, and Beyond while you're waiting because God must be really stupid or a really bad story teller, right? No.

I think He has something for us. I think it comes out of the desires of your heart. I think He has a wonderful story for you."


If I can find a way to post them on the blog, I will, and you can listen to them for yourself if you'd like. I'm inspired. I'm motivated. I want a really, really beautiful story. And the originally muddled vision I had for this blog just got clear.

So let the writing begin.