The Movie of Your Life

I’m a screenwriter, so I create movie ideas for a living.

I was recently outlining a new script, and the parallels between storytelling and pursuing a relationship struck me. It may sound strange, but there are similarities. 

First, a movie idea always starts with a spark—an image, a scene, something that captures your imagination and fills you with passion. It’s usually the same for a romantic relationship. You meet a person and something exciting, something almost magical, seizes you. You want to know more. You want to see where it might lead. So you start exploring the idea—or relationship—to see if it might become something bigger.

As a writer, I have to first create an outline of the journey to come. I envision scenes with characters that interact to form a whole narrative. Hopefully, it’s moving, entertaining, and a pleasure to experience. That’s what we hope for a new romance too.

At the beginning, you’re always facing a blank page, so you have to just dive in and start writing, with faith that something beautiful will emerge.

But here’s the crazy thing. As you start to write, you find that the characters in your story will surprise you. You may have pictured them saying a particular line of dialogue, but they will inevitably surprise you. Characters take on a life of their own and, as a writer, you have to listen to what they are trying to say, not just force your own words on them. They will say and do things you didn’t expect. It’s the same, of course, with real people. 

When you fall in love, you’ll quickly find that the other person is a unique human being. You can’t control them. You have to let them be who they are, and they must do the same for you.

The original story you envisioned will take unexpected turns too.

You might have concocted a particular scenario. You fall in love, quickly get engaged and married, honeymoon in the Tropics, have three children, and each pursue your careers in a harmonious life. 

But every story I’ve ever written, no matter how carefully I initially planned it, will inevitably take its own course. So will the life of any human relationship. And if you truly care about the story, and the relationship, you have to learn to roll with it, to go where it takes you.

That’s not to say you don’t have the free will and power to make choices that determine your destiny. It’s just that you have to be humble, open, and creative. 

Love stories—on the screen and in real life—require flexibility, humility, faith, and great care.

But perhaps the most pertinent parallel between screenwriting and love is that it’s not all just magic and excitement. It takes a lot of work. No screenplay, and no relationship, spontaneously appears fully formed. 

Sometimes I write a scene, but when I look at it the next day, it’s not as good as I’d hoped. I have to scrap it and start over. Sometimes in relationships, we try to love well, but we make mistakes. We have to let the past go and begin anew, with faith that something good and true will develop as we keep working on it.

For a screenplay, this process repeats itself over and over. It can take months. A marriage relationship lasts a lifetime. It’s a never-ending process. 

It takes faith to face the blank page and trust that a beautiful story will emerge. But that’s part of the joy of it all. 

And as Catholics, we have a Divine author guiding the process, if we cooperate with God. In his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, author Donald Miller, reflecting on his life as a story, says this: 

“I don't wonder anymore what I'll tell God when I go to heaven when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city… I’ll tell these things to God, and he'll laugh, I think, and he'll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorite. We'll sit and remember my story together, and then he'll stand and put his arms around me and say, "well done," and that he liked my story. And my soul won't be thirsty anymore.”

We are all living a story, with our lives and in our relationships. It’s a mysterious process and it takes work. But when we entrust our stories to God and cooperate with him in the telling of them, we have hope that they will end up as something great.