In fact, even as I boarded a plane yesterday, well after we should have chosen our winner, we couldn’t decide. I finally left it in the hands of my faithful and prayerful assistant Tara, who told me when I landed in Chicago that she was having “panic attacks.” The final decision was very difficult, and included a secondary round of questions for about a dozen final contestants. In the end, we chose the contestant we felt the seminar would help the most. Again, it was tough. But the winner is Lori Ventola of Denver, Colorado. Lori wants to start a mobile after-school program helping children of the homeless transition into school. She has a plan and a vision, and we are hoping the seminar brings some ideas into clarity and gives her the inspiration she needs.

Lori, we are flying you and a friend to Portland and putting you up at a swanky hotel near the venue. We will even save seats for you wherever you want. You are our guest of honor! On the first night, I’ll bring you on stage to share a bit of your story, and where you’d like your story to go. Lori, this picture of you laughing did us all in. We love it, and we think you are going to be doing a lot of laughing when you come to Portland. Life is hard, but even the hard parts are worth celebrating. God is always molding our story into an epic narrative that is designed to save many lives. I can’t wait to meet you in person before the seminar.

The Living a Better Story Seminar is a Seminar for people who want to do great things with their lives, who want to live a story that has meaning and helps and inspires others. If you’re wanting to spend time in a room full of people who are doing remarkable and unique things, whether it’s starting hospitals or creating movies or turning their own homes into orphanages, you’ll want to join us!

If you’ve yet to register for the seminar, you can do so here. We’ll see you soon in Portland! Less than a month to go!!

Writing is not like painting in that a painter can sit down in front of a tree and paint, and when he is done, he can turn his chair around and paint some other tree, or building, or waterfall. Ideas aren’t so plentiful.

So what do I do when the inkwell runs dry? I fill it up. Or at least I try. Here are some tips:

• Don’t panic. As a writer, you are good at processing and communicating ideas, but you didn’t come up with the ideas. They existed before you and will exist after you. You are simply the filter through which ideas get poured and processed. There are more ideas out there.

• Get some rest. Your filter is not a fixed mechanism, it’s a living brain, and it needs rest. Take a break from all things philosophical for a while. Attend a movie, read a book, take a nap, but let your mind recover.

• Pray. I’m a firm believer that God brings us things to write about, word pictures to paint, ideas that are good for the world. Pray and wait.

Sooner or later you’ll be writing again.

What do you do when the words won’t come?

It wasn’t until I attended a rather academic camp in Colorado that I started reading. The camp aimed to prepare kids for college, and as such emphasized reading books, lots and lots of books. They must have said a thousand times that readers are leaders. I believed them. I started reading that summer (I was probably 18) and I kept reading, book after book for the next fifteen years. These days, I’m embarrassed to say, I read less than I have since then. I may tackle thirty books each year. I read blogs and articles on the internet, and I watch too much television. I write some sort of article or blog entry almost every day, which is a terrific discipline for a writer, but I’ve slacked off on reading.

That said, though, if it’s true leaders are readers, than it’s easier than ever to be a leader. In fact, if you’ll commit to reading a single book, you’ll be, approximately, in the top 50% of all Americans. I’m not kidding. If you’ll read just one more book before you die, you’ll leave half the people around you in the dust.

According to Para Publishing, 1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. And 42% of college graduates follow suit. 70% of U.S. adults have not stepped into a bookstore in the last 7 years and 80% of American families did not purchase or read a book last year.

About the time I started reading, I bought a book of poems for a friend. The book was Selected Poems and Letters of Emily Dickinson. But I never gave the book to my friend. I began to read Emily’s letters and found her economy of words magical. I couldn’t understand how anybody could say so much with so few words. What I was experiencing as I read the book was the gap in literacy from her life in Amherst to mine in Texas nearly one-hundred years later. Noah Webster would frequent the Dickinson home, and he would sit in the parlor talking to her father about a new project he was writing, a list of words and definitions that would later become Webster’s Dictionary. She read novels rather than watch movies. She read short stories rather than watch television. And at the tender age of thirteen, her letters to her brother Austin were mesmerizing in their descriptions and fluidity.

I memorized a few of Emily’s poems, and I found my own writing improved the more I tumbled her words around in my head. From Emily I memorized Rudyard Kipling and then Robert Herrick (To the Virgins to Make Much of Time!) and Longfellow and Byron’s She Walks in Beauty. I started reading Shakespeare, even though I didn’t understand him. It didn’t matter that I didn’t understand him, because I could understand parts, and the parts were worth the reading of the whole. To this day, when young writers ask me for advice, I tell them to memorize poems. I tell them to never let me encounter them again unless they have an index card in their pocket with a few lines written on it that they are committing to memory.

But my point is this: If you want to be a person of influence, or if you want to lead, or for that matter if you want to succeed, start reading. These days, you have less competition than your parents had, or their parents for that matter. If you read as few as fifty books, you’ll be considered a genius. Subscribe to the Economist and read a handful of articles each week and your friends will wonder when you intend to run for congress.

Turn off your television and read two books a week next year and you’ll be counseling the Pope or the President. It’s true what I learned all those years ago: Readers are leaders.

For years, my favorite poet has been Billy Collins.

I had lunch with a friend last week that had quit drinking. He’s an artist, a writer, and I asked about his career. He’d just released a new project. He told me he was so busy trying not to drink that he really didn’t care whether or not his art succeeded. I liked that. It felt comforting to hear it. The art wasn’t what his life was about anymore, his life was about his life, and he wasn’t polling to see who was interested. He had more important battles to fight, and the writing was just an outlet.

So as writers, that’s the place we have to find. The place that has us sitting in front of our typewriters, our skin off and crumpled on the floor by our feet. Here’s that poem from Billy:

Purity

My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,

weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.

This is how I go about it:

I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.

Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile

as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only

a white shirt, a pair of pants, and a pot of cold tea.

Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.

I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.

I do this so that what I write will be pure,

Completely rinsed of the carnal,

uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.

Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them

on a small table near the window.

I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms

when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.

Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.

I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.

I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.

I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.

Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.

In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,

most of them exploiting the connection between sex

and death.

I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe

where there is nothing but sex, death and typewriting.

After a spell of this I remove my penis too.

Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.

Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.

Now I write only about death, most classical of themes

in language light as the air between my ribs.

Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.

I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh

And clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage

And speed through woods on winding country roads,

Passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,

All perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

Living a Better Story Blog Contest from Donald Miller on Vimeo.

You and a friend can win a trip to Portland Oregon for the Living a Better Story Seminar being held September 26th and 27th.

CONTEST RULES

1. Write a blog telling us about the kind of story you want to live. It might help to read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years to better understand what this means. The story doesn’t have to be a life story, it can be what you want to do next year, or for the next few years.

2. Tell us a little about how you think the seminar might help you out. You don’t have to get detailed, just let us know specifically what you’re hoping to get from the seminar. This will help us cover all our bases as people come to Portland.

3. Provide a link on your blog to the seminar site. That site is www.donmilleris.com/conference

4. Embed this video on your blog:

(to embed the video, simply click embed, then copy and paste the html code onto your blog)

5. Submit a link to your blog in the comments on THIS blog entry. If you submit a question about the contest, we will unfortunately have to delete the question because we are trying to keep the entries clean and organized.

On August 20th, at midnight, the contest is over. Please enter before then. That next week, we will print out all the entries, read through them and the staff here will choose a winner.

WHAT YOU WILL WIN IF CHOSEN:

1. We will fly you and a friend to Portland.

2. We will put you and your friend up in a swanky hotel.

3. We will vacuum the space around your seats and make sure you have fresh mints and bottled water.

4. You will receive a gift wrapped box in the mail. You are not allowed to open this box. You have to bring the box with you to the seminar. I will call you on stage and we will talk about your story before you can open the box.

You can learn more about the seminar here!

Best,

Don

FAQ:

Is the contest open to non-US residents?

Unfortunately it is not. But this isn’t because we don’t want it to be. It’s because of tax laws. It’s also not open to people who live in Rhode Island.

What if I can’t upload or embed the video?

You should be able to do this off of Vimeo. You might ask somebody who knows about the technology. But if you still can’t figure it out, follow the guidelines as best as you can and enter anyway. We are human beings with HUGE hearts!

What’s in the box that you are sending?

Unfortunately, we can’t tell you that. It’s part of the seminar. But you won’t get in trouble with the airlines for bringing it on the plane, I promise.

What if I have already registered, or register now?

We will refund your money for your plane ticket, and pick up another one for a friend. We’ll take care of the hotel, too. It’ll be as though you hadn’t registered.

LET ME GIVE YOU A TIP!!!!

If you write about how you want to be more passionate, or more intentional, or how you want to help people, the chances of you winning this contest are not as great as if you write about a specific story you want to live. What we are really looking for is something like a movie trailer of what you want to do. If you think about a movie trailer, it starts with a character and quickly shows us what he wants (usually to get out of a predicament, though your story probably won’t be about that, and then shows the conflict they are having to go through to get out of it…. So for you, just tell us what you want to do, then detail some of the conflict….If you want to start a dance school, for instance, it will require a building, some instructors, some interns, a computer system or whatever. The more specific, the better your chances of coming to Portland. Tell us what you want to do, what the conflict will be in doing it, and your plan for making it happen! Good luck!!!

Lucy Miller

You’ve probably noticed I’ve written fewer blog entries over the last couple weeks. There are a number of reasons for this, including a major project I’m trying to wrap up this summer, and an onslaught of guests traveling through town. All great stuff, but all keeping me from my daily discipline of blogging.

The other day, Lucy, my dog, asked if she could cover the blog for a while. We were at the park and I was moderating comments on my phone and I think she felt sorry for me. Lucy is my best friend and roomate and she see’s how busy my schedule has gotten. Lucy isn’t a writer by trade. She’s trains daily as a swimmer at the local fly-fishing pond at a park down the street, but I am going to give her a brief window to share some of her thoughts.

I’ve not turned the blog over to another writer for any length of time. I’ve had a few guest posts, but not many. I take this blog very seriously. I do this for free, so there is something pure about it and that helps me love it for the writing and thinking without a mixed motive getting in the way. So it was a struggle to turn it over.

But in the two years I’ve had Lucy, I’ve learned an enormous amount from her. She’s taught me to calm down, to rest, she’s taught me to focus, she’s taught me how to get along with people, and she’s taught me it doesn’t take much to be in a close relationship. So I’m hoping she can share some of that with you guys.

I’ll be back in a matter of days, but as of tomorrow, I’ll be turning this blog over to my dog. This will allow me to get caught up on my other work, and will also give me a chance to collect more wisdom worth sharing with the world.

Thank you for understanding.

Best,

Donald Miller

About every five years, a book that is still selling well will get a bit of a revamp. I’m glad this book is still out there doing well, and I’m incredibly honored that Thomas Nelson would do something this innovative around a rerelease. It’s book history! Thanks team!

If you’ve read A Million Miles, you know that a great story, and for that matter a great life, can’t get started unless the protagonist wants something. And the thing they have to want must come from their core values, and it must be specific, and it must be difficult to accomplish. And so I’ve started wondering if our addictions and our habits weren’t keeping us from wanting better ambitions, and if by not wanting better ambitions, we aren’t being robbed of great and fulfilling stories and lives.

Things that bring us pleasure are often good. Scratch that, they are often great. But most of our addictions bring us extreme pleasure without the cost of conflict. Porn brings us pleasure without the conflict of relationship. Alcoholism brings us a release of stress without having to deal with our issues. Overeating (my personal favorite) reduces stress and robs us of our dreams, dreams that MUST cost us conflict.

In the workbook I’m creating for the Living a Better Story Seminar, I’ve added an exercise to the conflict section in which participants write down their addictions and habits and connect them directly to a false sense of instant gratification, thus stealing our dreams.

So the question I’m asking myself lately, is how are my habits robbing my dreams? When the credits roll in my life, when the story is over, will I have been numbed out to the pain of life, the pain that was asking me to seek help, find healing, or press forward toward a better ending?

So how are your addictions and habits robbing you of a better story?