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.
Debbie Moon at 2012-09-19 18:24:45:
Nothing particular to add, but just wanted to say I'm really enjoying this fresh perspective on writing. Whatever your religious outlook, if any, these are themes and issues that run through all of our lives, and directly exploring the way they work in stories is fascinating.
Scott at 2012-09-20 00:30:37:
Shaula, in the Calvinist tradition, the Reformed group asserts that God predestines whom God wants to be saved and that without this predestination, none would be saved. The non-Reformed group states that God predestines people to salvation, but that these people freely choose to follow God on their own. Translating that to writing, we want to understand the sense of destiny of our key characters, but we want script readers to experience it as free will on the part of the characters. Hence screenwriters are [metaphorically] non-Reformed Calvinists. Who knew!
Scott at 2012-09-20 00:32:06:
Concur. I continue to look for new language systems / metaphors to explore to help us gain new insight into the craft of writing.
Shaula Evans at 2012-09-20 00:51:32:
I like that. I'll add "[metaphorically] non-Reformed Calvinist" to my list of affiliations.
Shaula Evans at 2012-09-20 00:55:10:
Speaking of religion and paradigms that help with writing, I meant to share this article with you ages ago. It's from a very good Zen blog and it discusses the Six Realms of Existence in Buddhism: Staying Human. When I read it, I thought it was a great tool to think through character flaws: which realm does this character inhabit in general? Which realm is this character inside in this moment?
EDN_80 at 2012-09-20 20:44:30:
Fascinating articles! Been a long-time lurker/reader, but I confess I didn't know It's actually nice to point out that, as much as we'd like to forget it in our increasingly secular world, elemental notions such as sin, transformation, predestination, salvation, etc... are and always will be part of the human experience. While doing research for my own script, I was reading and listening to what Tony Keen, Susanna Braund, Andreas Kluth, and other scholars had to say about the role of predestination in cinema and fiction, and out all the above notions, it seems to be the most problematic in our modern, "egalitarian", and decidedly deterministic society. They spoke of THE AENEID and why Aeneas was NOT a type of hero Hollywood could espouse. Achilles in TROY was. Achilles = warlike, defiant, vainglorious = modern. Aeneas = predestined to save people, yes, but dutiful, passive = old. Modern audiences, it seems, respond better to a take charge hero, a hero who controls his own destiny. The skill, as has been said above, is to make the predestination seem inevitable in the end, yet invisible throughout. I wonder how the writer(s) will handle say, the upcoming NOAH and MOSES, two instances where the moral imperatives impelling action and leading to salvation will not be inborn, but rather divine, external forces (unless it's made clear that the divine forces are indeed inborn - that is, born in the mind.) Let's wait and see!
EDN_80 at 2012-09-20 20:46:39:
* but I confess I didn’t know that you had a background in Divinity.
Win Vahlkamp at 2012-09-25 23:39:48:
This makes me think of your mantra, Scott - "the only way out is through."
The [Secular] Theology of Screenwriting | FilmmakerIQ.com at 2012-10-04 10:59:42:
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