Donald Miller is back. I don’t know where he went. What he was doing. But he’s back. Back as in Blue-Like-Jazz-Back. In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years Miller takes the reader through the journey of writing a script based upon his life (with some of the key stories from Blue Like Jazz). The writing process causes him to reflect upon the way in which a “great life shares the same characteristics as a great novel.”

“I like the part of the Bible that talks about God speaking the world into existence, as though everything we see and feel were sentences from his mouth, all the wet world of his spit. I feel written. My skin feels written, and my desires feel written. My sexuality was a word spoken by God, that I would be male, and I would have brown hair and brown eyes and come from a womb. It feels literary, doesn’t it, as if we are characters in books . . . You call it God or a conscience, or you can dismiss it as that intuitive knowing we all have as human beings, as living storytellers; but there is a knowing I feel guides me toward better stories, toward being a better character. I believe there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness,” (86).

On the “inciting incident” (or “ruptures in the narrative” as I’ve been taught in literary circles)–”. . . 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 . . . James Scott Bell says an inciting incident is a doorway through which the protagonist cannot return. I didn’t know I was doing it at the time, but I had certainly walked  through a doorway. I was an overweight, out-of-shape guy who wanted to get into shape and date a specific girl. I’d walked through a doorway that would force me both to get into shape and to interact with her. I suppose I didn’t have to get into shape, but if I didn’t, the story would be a tragedy. And nobody wants to live a tragedy,” (110).