The Middle of Your Story

“The reward you get from a story is always less than you thought it would be, and the work is harder than you imagined. The point of story is never about the ending remember. It’s about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle.” –Donald Miller, A Million Miles In A Thousand Years

This is not only discouraging, but exhausting just thinking about it. And yet, I want nothing more than to live a beautiful and meaningful and memorable story in which I am different at the end than I was at the beginning. Geez, am I crazy? I know I am exhausted—already! But it’s a beautiful idea isn’t it? To be different at the end than you were at the beginning?

To be calmer, more appreciative, more loving, more peaceful, more understanding, more joyous, more wise, more content. I can’t think of a better way for this life to end: to have survived the middle, to let it change you.

“So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing that the last lines will speak of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.” –Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts