A Thousand Years, By Donald Miller

Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years discusses the aspects of telling a great story about your life, and how we find the significance in random events and piece them together into a lesson that we learned. Miller dives into the question of how much of a story needs to be fact to be considered, the “truth.” This topic is the centerpoint for the Tim Burton film, Big Fish. Both works deal with the tension between reality and imagination, losing touch with the “Truth”, and the ability to say things through stories that we otherwise could not. The tension between reality and imagination is heavily discussed in both Donald Miller’s book and Big Fish. Donald Miller states that, “A stories is based on what people think is important…
Donald Miller takes on the question of how much can you change before the story becomes just a tall tale. Miller argues that, “Genuine reflection reveals what you got-- or, more often, what you wanted -- from those experiences. And if you tell your story with those lessons ‘filling in the gaps,’ only then are you telling the real truth. The truth. Wrapped in a lie.”(Miller 29). Miller is arguing that we alter our stories so that the lessons we learned are reflected in them. Big Fish shows this through Edward Bloom’s stories and how his son William preserves them. Edward tells his story any chance he gets, whether it's at his son’s wedding or to anyone that would listen. This is because Edward has unarguably, a great story. The reason why his stories are great are because he took what he learned or got from experiences in his life, and recreates them with fantasy and wonder. This makes his story very compelling and interesting. However, William does not feel the same way about his father’s stories. William does not understand that his father had done as Miller explained. Edward took the truth, filled in the gaps, and created the real Truth. William only realizes this when his father passes away. William final draws the conclusion that, “In telling the story of my father’s life, it’s impossible to separate fact from fiction -- the man from the myth. The best I can do is tell it the way he told me. It doesn’t always make sense, and most of it never happened. But that’s what kind of story this is.” William concludes that his father made his story up based around the truth, but it is impossible to tell the difference between what is real and what isn't. This is because Edward created the Truth with his