Wasn’t it beautiful when you believed in everything, and everybody believed in you?
-Taylor Swift
In his book A Million Miles in A Thousand Years, Don Miller says a lot of interesting things but it’s more like a guide to how to write a good story rather than anything particularly inspirational or moving. I was kind of disappointed, although there’s this one thing he brought up about story-writing that made me nod enthusiastically in agreement. He says
But stories are only partly told by writers. They are also told by the characters themselves. Any writer will tell you characters do what they want.
If I wanted my character to advance the plot by confronting another character, the character wouldn’t necessarily obey me. I’d put my fingers on the keyboard, but my character, who was supposed to go to Kansas, would end up in Mexico, sitting on a beach drinking a margarita. I’d delete whatever dumb thing the character did and start over, only to have him grab the pen again and start talking nonsense to some girl in a bikini.
And as I worked on the novel, as my character did what he wanted and ruined my story, it reminded me of life in certain ways…I could see God sitting at his computer, staring blankly at his screen as I asked him to write in some money and some sex and some comfort.
So as I was writing my novel, and as my character did what he wanted, I became more and more aware that somebody was writing me…[And] after thirty years of [not] having anything like to a desire, the Writer who is not me told me I was to find my father.
I told God no, but he [kept coming] back to me and asked me if I really believed he could write a better story—and if I did, why didn’t I trust him?
I didn’t have an answer to that question. Why didn’t I trust God? I believed he was the Writer who was not me and he could writer a better story than I could, but I did not trust him.
I can relate to this so much, with how every story I write always ending up straying away from the plots I want, because the main character and I end up disagreeing so much. This may or may not seem weird to non-writers, but story-writing is intertwined with life, and here’s how I would explain it with a piece of mine.
There used to be a person I liked, and I don’t know if I still like him because I don’t struggle with it as much as I used to. But he became an inspiration in my life, and he was more religious than I, so I let him write my story. Everyone told me to seek God, I didn’t know how to on my own, and he was there to help, so naturally I put my world into his hands. I trusted he could write my story better than anyone else, even better than God could. God never sat down with me and pointed out flaws, suggesting revisions and laughing at my terrible jokes. It was too hard to let God write it anyway because I was never sure if I was listening to Him or to my own ambitions. It’s different with a real person.
So I let him write it, and after a while, a little too late, I realized he wasn’t very good. In fact, he was pretty terrible at it and you can never be satisfied when another person is controlling and suggesting things for you to do anyway. I had gotten confused too because along the way, I started convincing myself that this is what God wanted; that God was writing my story through the person I liked because I had associated the two of them with each other too closely. It was so discouraging that I threw all my so-called spiritual experiences into a trashcan and held the pen to my own story. I let God play the secondary character instead of the writer and I cut the other person out completely for a while.
That’s when I decided more than ever that I wanted to start over. I want to let God write my story for me, but I don’t trust Him enough just yet to let him do so. Sometimes I do hesitantly hand over the pen, but He always ends up writing for me something I don’t want, so I stubbornly take it back. You know those people who are always walking around, staring at objects and making decisions while asking themselves, “What would Jesus do? Would Jesus do this? Would He do that?” I think that’s where the gospel really influences lives, where God finds room to write.
I walk around asking myself, “What would Jesus do? Can I just do that later?” I'm waiting for God to change me, but I'm making Him wait for me to change.
