A Quote by Donald Miller
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.”
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What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.
God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in His image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in Him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by Him, His mark is deep within us. We have God's joy in our blood.
I don't know your story or your dreams or the things that steal your sleep, but I know they matter. I hope you story is rich with characters, rich with friends and conversation. I hope you know some people who carry you, and I hope you have the honor of carrying them. I hope that there's beauty in your memories, and I hope it doesn't haunt you. And if it does, then I hope there is someone who will walk you through the night and remind you of the promise of the sunrise, that beauty keeps coming, that there are futures worth waiting and fighting for, and that you were made to dream.
The biggest threat to your creativity is the fear that it's already been done, said, created. (So why bother?)
Say it, do it, make it anyway - but tell YOUR story along the way.
The story of how you came to know what you know.
The story of what you want to know more of.
The story of why you do what you do.
The story of how you came to care.
And that's how you create what's never been created before.
I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.
There is an old story from the Eastern tradition that says that when the gods created the universe, they found a place for everything but the truth, and this created a problem, because the gods did not want this wisdom discovered right away. One of the gods suggested the top of the highest mountain, another the farthest star, a third spoke up for the dark side of the moon, and another for the bottom of the deepest ocean. Finally, they decide to place truth inside the human heart. In that way, we would search for it all over the universe, with the secret within us all the time.
Beauty is transcendent. It is our most immediate experience of the eternal. Think of what it's like to behold a gorgeous sunset or the ocean at dawn. Remember the ending of a great story. We yearn to linger, to experience it all our days. Sometimes the beauty is so deep it pierces us with longing. For what? For life as it was meant to be. Beauty reminds us of an Eden we have never known, but somehow our hearts were created for.
Without the incarnation, Christianity isn’t even a very good story, and most sadly, it means nothing. "Be nice to one another" is not a message that can give my life meaning, assure me of love beyond brokenness, and break open the dark doors of death with the key of hope.
Respect is one of the greatest expressions of love. If other people try to write your story, it means they don't respect you. They consider that you're not a good artist who can write your own story, even though you were born to write your own story.
In TV, you're a 'writer for hire.' That means you're trying to guess what your boss wants and delivering that story. There's a lot of spitballing. The big thing is 'breaking story,' which means coming up with a story. You do it by episode and put it all up on a board.
I'm a writer and this is what I do no matter what name we put to it. Year by year, the world is turning into a darker and stranger place than any of us could want. This is the only thing I do that has potential to shine a little further than my immediate surroundings. For me, each story is a little candle held up to the dark of night, trying to illuminate the hope for a better world where we all respect and care for each other.
Do remember, though, that unless you're a playwright, the result [dialogue] isn't what you want; it's only an element of what you want. Actors embody and re-create the words of drama. In fiction, a tremendous amount of story and character may be given through the dialogue, but the story-world and its people have to be created by the storyteller. If there's nothing in it but disembodied voices, too much is missing.
Eva is a story of repetition. It is a story where our protagonist faces the same situation many times over and determinedly picks himself back up again. It is a story of the will to move forward, even if only a little. It is a story of the resolve to want to be together, even though it is frightening to have contact with others and endure ambiguous loneliness. I would be most gratified if you found enjoyment in these four parts as it takes the same story and metamorphoses it into something different.
In the thousands of stories I've collected over the years there are people who just want to know that their story matters, that their story isn't beyond hope. And people, no matter how broken a story I might read, I have always found at least a glimpse of God's hand still at work in each and every story. I have been powerfully reminded that God is in the junkyard business. He willingly walks into the messiest parts of our lives, gets his hands dirty, and begins building something beautiful out of that very thing which the world might overlook as worthless.
'The Story Of A Marriage' was initially a short story I wrote, and before that, it was a family story. It was a story that a relative of mine told me about herself in the '50s, and it was a story that no one else in my family believes, and it might not be true.
Suppose you stand on a high place to enjoy the beauty of the sparkling sea below. You need do nothing to create that beauty; you need only BE IN THE SAME PLACE WHERE IT IS, and let nature do the rest. So it is with the inner life. There is nothing we can DO to gain psychic beauty. It already exists without our effort. We need only be where we belong, that is, in self-union. Then, beauty IS.
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