An older, wiser follow-up to Blue Like Jazz

By Kurt Armstrong and ChristianWeek | August 14, 2009

Looking for a good story? So is Donald Miller.

"Good stories don't happen by accident," writes Miller, the charming, self-effacing writer who made a big splash with Blue Like Jazz. His own story, he admits, has been too safe to be very good. "I live in fantasies," he says. "As a writer, I've turned daydreaming into a cottage industry."

With A Million Miles in A Thousand Years, Miller starts a different, richer story.
The book begins with Miller meeting two movie producers who want to turn Blue Like Jazz into a movie. They want his help, but he doesn't know anything about writing a screenplay. Most of Blue Like Jazz was about his thoughts and feelings, but a movie needs a story, and a good story needs action.

As he and the filmmakers work on the script, Miller starts to reflect on his own life. He considers his friends with great lives, men and women who marry, have kids, take big risks, follow callings rather than careers, and he realizes "the elements that make a story meaningful were the same that made a life meaningful."

In stories and in life, interesting characters want something and have to overcome conflict to get it. But what has he done? And what does he want?

He realizes hasn't done much but write, and what he really wants is a meaningful life. Miller can see that his years of watching TV, eating fatty snacks and typing his thoughts and feelings haven't been all that meaningful.

So he starts doing things instead. He starts to get fit, goes on a trek in Peru, falls in love, rides his bike across the country, tracks down his dad. Nothing as earth-shattering as some of his globetrotting friends' philanthropic adventures, but for Miller, they're a good start.

His writing is funny and self-deprecating, but also intimate and wise. When he writes about loneliness and death he's heartbreaking. If Blue Like Jazz made us feel like Donald Miller was our friend, A Million Miles makes us want to catch up with him. He's growing up, getting wiser, sharing what he's learning. "If a story sets our moral compass," he says, "my compass had changed from cynicism to hope."

It's contagious.