Shaula Evans at 2012-09-19 15:13:05:
Thank you for this series, Scott. I'm always excited when you roll up your Yale Divinity sleeves on the blog.
For me, predestination is a lens best looked through backwards:
1. I want my characters to have free will and plenty of it, but by the end of the story, I want the course of events to feel inevitable in retrospect: these are the only choices these characters could have made in those moments and been true to their natures.
2. I'm not ready to write until I know the characters well enough that the choices they make create that sense of inevitability. In that way, predestination is a good benchmark to measure when I have grasped the story world to the point that I can write it.
Across the board, creating a feeling of predestination is a goal I work toward in screenwriting.