Despite the studios’ belief that stories for movies can be a concocted accumulation of beats, re-writes and punch-ups, I think there is a true story. What I call a Life Script, versus just a well-crafted studio carnival ride. A true story can both entertain and change our souls a little… while the concocted stories can look powerful on the outside, like a shiny suit of armor. But, they often lack heart and a human feeling on the inside and feel insubstantial.
I have no objections to creating any story with any method… What works for you is sacred. Creating anything is overcoming doubt and a considerable accomplishment, so I have a basic rule – “ignore everything I say that goes against your creative process.”
But, when two people in one week (my close filmmaker friend, Todd Robinson and a writer and wonderful writer’s advocate, Patrick Horton) end up discussing with me the emotional purpose of creating a story – and they both hit on the same concept: “That most writers, when free to explore their creativity – write their best stories with the pain of some very personal life experience at their core, even the though the mechanism that carries that pain may be a comedy or a even romance,” I find their ideas appeal to my prejudices. We all may be wrong – but I love having the company!
Over years of filmmaking I have become convinced that we watch movies to subconsciously learn from the characters’ growths, mistakes and changes. In a very simplified way we humans gain from watching others screw-up, get damaged or attempt to devise methods to succeed at life goals. The more the characters struggle to change, overcome their limitations, failures, flaws and achieve their goals, the more we get a free set of subconscious tools to model off their results and improve our own opportunities.
With MRI research we have discovered parts of the brain called mirror neurons that light up in our brains when we watch other humans perform activities or exhibit emotions. If we watch a gymnast do a back flip – the same parts of our brains light up – even though we are not moving a muscle ourselves. We are a social animal; we have lived in packs, tribes, villages, close communities over millions of years. Evolution has helped those survive who learned from observing the struggles of others and making changes to their own tactics and thus succeeding. And truly valuable stories offer that observation without demanding a lot of effort. Maybe we don’t have to be stabbed in the back by Brutus to learn the signs of betrayal? Maybe we can gain a mating advantage from watching the struggles in a love story, like Romeo and Juliet? And with Piranha 3D— Jaws – Alien – Jurassic Park, we even learn how to avoid being eaten! A powerfully valuable asset in ancient times – and because human instincts take hundreds of thousands of years to change, stories about how to avoid being eaten still have a giant primal if not very practical appeal.
Wait a minute, what has this to do with writing again?
Well I think our brains work two ways: receiving data and sending it out. What if nature also evolved to compel humans to tell stories that came from the experiences that damaged them? I lost my mother at age 8 – I find I continuously write stories where the lead characters have a mother issue and struggle to repair flawed lives where parted loved ones experience reconciliations at the end. Loss being repaired. Is it possible that when we write from gut instincts we are actually using our pain and losses as a gift to other tribe/pack members? A natural way of gaining value for them? Valuable enough that we creators, we shaman oral history carriers – were selected for, by nature? Because we added to the success of our communities’ genes? Art as a survival mechanism?
An amazing thing happens when you free yourself from rigid rules and goals of trying to meet the market, and instead create from your own inner life instincts – the material frequently flows more easily. It has a deeper consciousness of human existance – it is more poetic and shows your true voice. The process can impassion. And I have discovered, when I thought I was stealing time away from my real job of chasing what “they” want. Those scripts I wrote because I had to, get made more often than the ones the studios pay me for.
Posted by Ryan Dixon on Monday, June 20, 2011: ScriptShark
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