Intro

• The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won't make a story meaningful, it won't make a meaningful life either. 

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Random Scenes 

•   The thing about trying to remember your life is it makes you wonder what any of it means. You get the feeling life means something, but you're not sure what. Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. 

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My life was Boring

•   If you don't obey certain principles, the story doesn't make sense. Without story, experience are just random. 

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My Uncle's funeral and a wedding

•   I didn't mind putting Don through conflict, because I knew no matter what happened to him we would make things work out in the end.

• Characters have to face their greatest fears with courage. That's what makes a story good. If you think about the stories you like the most, they probably have lots of conflicts. These polar charges, these happy and sad things in life, are like colors GOd uses to draw the world. Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the potential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller. 

• The thing about death is it reminds you the story we are telling has finality. 

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How Jason saved his family

•   He hadn't mapped out a story for his family. And so his daughter had chosen another story, a story in which she was wanted, even if she was only being used. In the absence of a family story, she'd chosen a story in which there was risk and adventure, rebellion and independence. She's not a bad girl, she was just choosing the best story that was available to her. 

• But that's done now. No girl who plays the role of a hero dates a guy who uses her. She knows who she is. She just forgot for a little while. 

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Writing the World

•   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. 

• If life isn't remarkable, then we don't have to do any of that (move and breathe and face conflict with courage); we can be unwilling victims rather than grateful participants.

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Imperfect is Perfect

•   Once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don't have a choice. Not living a better story would be like deciding to die, deciding to walk around numb until you die, and it's not natural to want to die.

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You'll be different at the end

•   If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. 

• We were designed to live through something rather than to attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us. The  point of a story is the character arc, the change. 

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How to write a better story

•   A general rule in creating stories is that characters don't want to change, they must be forced to change. Humans are designed to seek comfort and order, and so if they have comfort and order, they tend to plant themselves, even if their comfort isn't all that comfortable. And even if they secretly want for something better. 

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An Inciting Incident

•  Perhaps one of the reasons I've avoided having a clear ambition is that second you stand up and point toward a horizon, you realize how much there is to lose. It's always been this way. 

• Great stories goes to those who don't give in to fear.

• Fear isn't only a guide to keep us safe; it's also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

• It's true that while ambition creates fear, it also creates the story. But it's a good trade, because as soon as you point toward a horizon, life no longer feels meaningless. And suddenly there is risk in your story and a question about whether you'll make it. You have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. 

• No character had a vague ambition. It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want. 

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Negative Turns

•   She wondered why it mattered if Jesus hung on the cross and died. Since the world went crazy anyways. See, you created us only to let us march around in our own misery, You're supposed to be good. What are you good for? She was ready to pray her last prayer announcing that she could no longer believe in God in a world with such pain, with so much devastation. 

• This is what happens when people walk away from Me. This is what happens when my compassion and love leave a place. It is when people do not allow God to show up through them, that the world collapses in on itself. 

• There is a force resisting the beautiful things in the world, and too many of us are giving in. The world needs for us to have courage. The world needs for us to write something better. 

• Maybe, I assumed, this was the only thing that would come out of this story, just the affirmation that I was somebody willing to do a bold thing. 

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A Good story, Hijacked

•   The ambitions we have will become the stories we live. If you want to know what a person's story is about, just ask them what they want. If we don't want anything, we are living boring lives, and if we want a Roomba vaccum cleaner, we are living stupid stories. If it won't work in a story, it won't work in life. 

• All of us are living stories, and those stories teach other people to live stories. And what our stories are about matters, not just for us but for the world. 

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A Positive Turn

•   I knew I needed an inciting incident, something to make me jump into the story. 

• I didn't want his words to mean anything. I didn't want to need his affirmation. But part of ourselves is spirit and our spirits are thirsty, and my father's words went into my spirit like water. 

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Meeting Bob

•   And I found myself wanting better stories. And that's the thing you'll realize when you organize your life into the structure of story. You'll get a taste for one story and then want another, and then another, and the stories will build until you're living a kind of epic of risk and reward, and the whole thing will be molding you into the actual character whose roles you've been playing. And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time. The more practice stories I lived, the more I wanted an epic to climb inside of and see through till its end. 

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The thing about a crossing

•   The shore you left is just as distant, and there is no going back; there is only the decision to paddle in place or stop, slide out of the hatch, and sink into the sea. Maybe there's another story at the bottom of the sea. Maybe you don't have to be in this story anymore.

• You have to go there. You have to take your character to a place where he just can't take it anymore. Writing a story isn't about making your peaceful fantasies come true. The whole point of the story is the character arc. You didn't think joy could change a person, did you? Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it's conflict that changes a person. You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That's the only way we change.  

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The Pain will Bind us

•   I realized how much of our lives are spent trying to avoid conflict. Half the commercials on televisions are selling us something that will make life easier. Part of me wonders if our stories aren't being stolen by the easy life. 

• I remembered about story, about how every conflict, no matter how hard, comes back to bless the protagonist if he will face his fate with courage. There is no conflict a man can endure that will not produce a blessing. It hurts now, but I'll love this memory. 

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A tree in a story about a Forest 

•   You never see this in movies. Characters don't look at themselves in the bathroom mirror for hours wondering why they can no longer feel. Characters in movies progress. But I didn't know what direction to move. As my story stopped, so did I. You can't go on without a story any longer than you can read a book about nothing.  

• After a tragedy, I think God gives us a period of numbing as a kind of grace. Perhaps he knows our small minds, given so easily to false hope, couldn't handle the full brunt of reality. 

• What I did instead, was throw myself at work, trying to restart my story as though the previous pages hadn't happened. It was all very clean and neat on the outside, but on the inside my narrative was incoherent. 

• The bones in my chest turned their sharp ends outward and made a tent of the skin over my heart. I told myself it wasn't true, that I was perfectly good person and God could change whatever it was that made me contemptible. I told myself there was still time. But counselors from hell spoke to me from under the pillows and behind the chairs until they had the big voice. I know the power a lie has to shrink time into what seems the eternal end of things. 

• I didn't want to learn whatever it was he wanted to teach me. I cried out to him an angry petition for rescue. I doubted him and needed him at the same time. God seemed to me, in that moment, a cruel father burning a scar into my skin with his cigarette. And yet I knew he was the only one with the power to make the pain go away. 

• The oldest book of the Bible is supposedly the book of Job. It is a book about suffering, and it reads as though God is saying to the world. Before we get started, there's this one thing I have to tell you. Things are going to get bad.

• Job understood the story was not about him, and he cared more about the story than he did about himself. 

• I didn't want to hear him at first. I didn't want to get well, because if I got well, nobody would come and save me anymore. And I didn't want to get well, because while I could not control my happiness, I could control my misery, and I would rather have had control than live in the tension of what if. A chance of hope is no pacifier against a sure tragedy. 

• He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. The story of the forest is better than the story of the tree. I sat by the fire and asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it meant to be a tree in that story. 

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The Reason God hasn't fixed you yet

•  But regardless how passionate the Utopians are, I simply don't believe utopia is going to happen. I don't believe we are going to be rescued. I don't believe an act of man will make things on earth perfect, and I don't believe God will intervene before I die, or for that matter before you die. I believe, instead, we will go on longing for a resolution that will not come, not within life as we know it, anyway. 

• I became a Christian based, in part, on this promise, but the hold never really went away. To be sure, I like Jesus, and I still follow Him, but the idea that Jesus will make everything better is a lie. It's basically biblical theology translated into the language of infomercials. Peter was crucified upside down, stephen was stoned outside the city gates. It's hard to imagine how a religion steeped in so much pain and sacrifice turned into a promise for earthly euphoria.

•  When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are. And when you stop expecting material possessions to complete you, you'd be surprised at how much pleasure you get in material possessions. And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you'd be surprised how much you like spending time with God. 

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Great Stories have Memorable Scenes

•   I don't think memorable scenes help a story make sense. Other principles accomplish that. What memorable scenes do is punctuate the existing rise and fall of a narrative. 

• He signed up so he could finish. He said he'd quit on three marriages, and he wouldn't want to quit a fourth. He said he'd quit on children, and he didn't want to quit on the responsibility of being a father with the ones who still loved him. "I'm going to finish this thing, I'm not a quitter anymore"

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The Beauty of a Tragedy

•  I wondered how much it costs to be rich in friends and how many years and stories and scenes it takes to make a rich life happen. I wanted even more to write a better story for myself, something that leaves a beautiful feeling even as the credits roll. 

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All you have to do is Try

•   It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything. 

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To Speak something into Nothing 

•   Bob thought about it, though, and realized it's more fun to be IN a parade than to watch one. So he made a rule: nobody would be allowed to watch the parade. But anybody could participate. I laughed as I imagine Bob standing on their neighbor's porch, explaining that if a parade marched by, please look away. Or join. 

• A good storyteller doesn't just tell a better story, though. He invites other people into the story with him, giving them a better story too.

• Nobody gets to watch the parade. 

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Where once there was nothing

•    It's interesting that in the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, the only practical advice given about living a meaningful life is to find a job you like, enjoy your marriage, and obey God. It's as though God is saying, write a good story, take somebody with you, and let me help. 

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Afterword

•   I'll tell these things to God, and he'll laugh, I think, and he'll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorites. We'll sit and remember my story together, and then he'll stand and put his arms around me and say "well done" and that he liked my story. And my soul won't be thirsty anymore.

• Finally, he'll turn and we'll walk toward the city, a city he will have spoken into existence, a city built in a place where once there'd been nothing.