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When Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz was edited to become a movie, Miller decided to make some edits of his own—to his own life. He begins to apply some film narrative techniques—for instance, a character needs to do something good before an audience will love him. Miller writes about hiking the Inca Trail in Peru, bicycling across the country, finding his father who he hadn't seen since childhood, and creating an organization for the fatherless in Portland. Before he began a 65-city book tour in September, Miller spoke with Christianity Today about creating a better story for himself.

In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, you write about making better stories for ourselves. Do you think that's a Christian idea?

No, that is just a good idea. The agenda behind this book is to help people understand how story works and how that could affect your lives. It's more universal. I mean it would be kind of like saying if you wrote a book about how to fix a television. As a Christian, how do you bring the gospel into that? Well, if you brought the gospel into that, you'd be just annoying because people want to know how to fix their television. I try not to spiritualize things that don't need to be spiritualized. And yet, you know, it is written from a memoir perspective, and I'm a Christian, and so that comes into this book.

Should Christians latch onto the idea that God works through the stories in our lives?

I wouldn't go that far. I think this book is much more utilitarian. I think it's very hard for us, for Christians, to understand that it's okay to read a book, for instance, on how to manage your time. There's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't have to be a Christian message and you don't have to proof text with Bible verses. You can imagine going on Amazon and seeing reviews on a book on time management that just harasses the author, you know, elevating experience over doctrine. This is just a book about finding more meaning in your everyday experiences.

So you wouldn't want readers to over-spiritualize what you're trying to say.

I would beg them not to. I think that because I'm a Christian they're looking for doctrinal statements, and I don't give doctrinal statements. So this is a book in that category: this next year you can live a much more meaningful life. Christians might say that you can't live a more meaningful life without Jesus. Well, that's absolutely not true. You can. You can enjoy a sunrise whether you know Jesus or not. It's not wrong for us to take something to somebody who doesn't know the Lord and show them the sunrise and say, "Isn't this beautiful?" I think that your audience is going to be the audience that does not understand this book. I apologize for that. There's nothing wrong with writing a book that's not overtly spiritual.

I didn't want to abuse Scripture. I didn't want to have a really great idea for a book and then go, okay, now how can I bring the Bible into this so it has a spiritual feel? Because we've all read those books and we just go you could have left all the Scripture out of this and it would have been fine. In fact, by putting Scripture into it, that's really not what that specific text is actually about. They're just making it serve their purpose. So I didn't want to do that with the text.

Where does Jesus fit into better storytelling?

Well, I think in the grand epic Jesus is the hero of our stories. And our stories, as they were, are subplots in a grand epic and our job is not to be the hero of any story. Our job is to be a saint in a story that he is telling. And that's a book that I'll write in the future. But this book was really much more of a practical idea, an introductory idea, if you will.

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September (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53