A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B002UF5KOE | Format: PDF
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life Description
Full of beautiful, heart-wrenching, and hilarious stories,
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years details one man's opportunity to edit his life as if her were a character in a movie. Years after writing his best-selling memoir, Donald Miller went into a funk and spent months sleeping in and avoiding his publisher. One story had ended, and Don was unsure how to start another. But he gets rescued by two movie producers who want to make a movie based on his memoir. When they start fictionalizing Don's life for film - changing a meandering memoir into a structured narrative - the real-life Don starts a journey to edit his actual life into a better story.
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years details that journey and challenges listeners to reconsider what they strive for in life. It shows how to get a second chance at life the first time around.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 5 hours and 11 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Thomas Nelson, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: October 26, 2009
- Language: English
- ASIN: B002UF5KOE
Ok, I'm a word snob. I write a lot and read even more. I know that Donald Miller is a good writer. A d-mn good writer. And there were many spots of superb prose on enough pages that kept me on the lookout for the next beauty of a passage. Like this one, for example, on page 155:
"And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time. The more practice stories I lived, the more I wanted an epic to climb inside of and see through till its end."
That is great writing. Miller is totally on his A-game with his craft in AMMiaTY.
Yet the whole time I was reading, there was a tension in my mind.I could not completely enter the dreamland that a book can take you to. I was distracted by a kind of angsty resistance to my perceived takeaway message of the content. The above passage is an example of what I mean.
Normal and ordinary living seem devalued in the premise of the Story about story. Epic living, like hiking the Inca Trail, biking across America, starting a non-profit....all great endeavors, and God knows we can all use a bit of epic goodness in our lives. Yet I can't help but wonder about celebrating normal and steady.
Most of us most of the time must make the best of the story we find ourselves in and make peace with the lack of epic drama. Most of us work at jobs to pay our rent and provide for the people we care for. We are kind to our neighbors and give at the office. This is our epic: that we show up everyday.
My tension with the author's premise about changing your story if you are living a boring life is perhaps just my own effed up issue.
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