Subtitle

...what I learned while editing my life...

That is the subtitle of Donald Miller's book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Do we ever do that? Edit our lives? That would require slowing down...stopping even. It's hard to edit something that is moving full speed ahead. And well, editing itself takes time. Have you ever seen how many standard proofreading marks there are? Then there are the copy editing marks. Whew. Sounds like work.

That's what Don has the rare opportunity to do. That is the unexpected catalyst for his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. A couple of guys tell Don that they would like to make a movie based on Blue Like Jazz. Cool, says Donald Miller. A movie about the successful book that was both authored and inspired by DM himself. Having a bit of writers block and being a tad short on cash flow - why not? Discussions begin to open up about story. Do audiences want to watch (ie - as in go to a movie) the same kinds of stories that they enjoy reading about? Does this or that kind of story draw in the audience? Does saying the story isn't so great, mean that the man himself isn't so great? Ego inflated moving quickly to ego deflated.

I'm pretty sure that my self-esteem isn't up to having someone else edit my story. "Honey, let's leave this out, no one really wants  to read about that." Some self-editing? Perhaps. Yep, I can think of few things, I'd like to end up on the cutting room floor. Surely I'm not the only one who'd like a "Take 2!" (or 10 or 20) for some moments of life. (I realize I am mixing the book and movie metaphors, but they aren't untangling in my mind, so I'm just moving forward.)

And as I type this tonight, I'm slowing down a bit. Stopping, if only for a moment, to take a look and see what in my story is worth looking at. Value in a story doesn't automatically equal a Disney-Princess-sort-of-story. Movie makers know that to bring the audience in the story has to be complex - they know we prefer a story that we can't figure out right away. Good story ≠ easy story. That short formula gives me some more hope. As of recent, my story hasn't been easy. So my story might not be as boring as a first glance might have seemed.