A Million Miles

I handed in the third draft of Contact on Friday.

While my editors look over it all, I’m spending a week up on the coast at South West Rocks/Eungai Creek.

I love staying up here. Good friends. Quiet. Plenty of time to talk and think and read.

I’ve just started on Don Miller’s new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.

In the book, Don talks about being asked to turn his memoir, Blue Like Jazz, into a screenplay – about the chance it gave him to edit his life into a great story, and how that pushed him to think about what it would mean to actually live a story like that the first time round.

I’m really enjoying it so far.

Here’s a bit from chapter ten:

When Steve, Ben, and I wrote our characters into the screenplay, I felt the way I hope God feels as he writes the world, sitting over the planets and placing tiny people in tiny wombs. 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.

I’ve wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don’t want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgement. We don’t want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breath and face conflict with courage. And if life isn’t remarkable, then we don’t have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims rather than grateful participants.

But I’ve noticed something. I’ve never walked out of a meaningless movie thinking all movies are meaningless. I only thought the movie I walked out on was meaningless. I wonder, then, if when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is their lives are meaningless. I wonder if they’ve chosen to believe their whole existence is unremarkable, and are projecting their dreary life on the rest of us.

I’m also planning to spend some of this week finishing up my outline for The Phoenix Files: Mutation. Really looking forward to getting stuck into writing it.