Deeper Meaning

Scripts are written and movies are made for a number of reasons: entertainment is probably the most important/essential, but they are also written to educate, to inspire, to scare, to make the audience laugh, cry, think, and feel.

As much as I enjoy a good laugh and sitting on the edge of my seat, tense and rooting for the hero, I don't ever want to write a script that doesn't have a deeper purpose. The science fiction script I'm writing now isn't just about a young girl who has to live with her mother's memories in her head and must ultimately decide what to do with those memories. I want it also to be about something an audience can relate to. We watch movies, read books, write our own stories and we often feel like we're living different lives vicariously through those characters. But what we know in our minds and what we actually experience in our own lives are two different things. Wendy thinks she understands the world by remembering her mother's past life, but she really has no idea because she's never personally experienced those events. In Star Trek Episode Three, Dr. McCoy asks Spock what its like to die. Spock answers that he cannot have the conversation with the doctor because he has never died, and so he couldn't possibly know what its like based off of Spock's experience.

Then again, if something real comes from something fantastical, what of that? At the end of the script, in her mind, Wendy and Corryn have their first conversation. Corryn doesn't say much, but Wendy tells her that she forgives her. Wendy experiences closure in her mind, and even though the situation never really happened, Wendy is able to move on. In the Matrix, Morpheus claims, "The mind makes it real." I want readers to ask, is this true? Can our mind really make things real? Wendy's answer would be yes, while Jenn would say no. One thing is for sure. Scientists still don't know what the mind is completely capable of. I watched a video about quantum mechanics where the scientist said if we focus our mind on something strong enough, we can make it happen. This is only a theory, but perhaps one day, we will know just how powerful the mind can be.

Long Road Ahead

My big problem, now that I've done most of the research and tackled the technical issues, is getting the story to flow correctly. I'm completely against flashbacks, so I'm trying my best to have a parallel story between Corryn's past life and Wendy's life now, especially since a lot of Corryn's past is being mixed in and confusing Wendy's present. I'm also trying to create suspense in the beginning and up to the end of the first act, but I'm wondering if I'm giving too much (or not enough) information away. Therefore, I feel like this first draft is going to be messy. But as long as I get it written, I'm confident that the rewrites will bring the story together and enhance the character development.

Forgetting is Important

I was thinking about Wendy's problem in the middle of the script where she begins to forget her mother's memories. I started doing research on forgetting, and theories show that it's just as important as remembering for our brains.

What would life be like if we didn't forget? There a book called "The Woman Who Can't Forget," and her brian couldn't handle all of the information. She would constantly get headaches. She would always be stressed out. The mind creates room by storing information in long term memory and losing information that isn't relevant over time.

These are the youtube videos I found on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbiTuDSHa2M and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbiTuDSHa2M. The second youtube video uses a quote, "The strength of your mind dictates the size of your reality." The quote refers to the movie, Momento.

As I've written before, most of our memories are recalled by remembering the process in which we stored these memories into our brains. (That's confusing, let me try again.) If I'm taking a test and I'm trying to remember what I studied, I first remember that I was sitting at my desk, searching through my book, looking up a certain passage, and finally I remember what was inside the book. Through our experiences, we can remember information. WELL, since Wendy was given this information and she didn't actually learn it or experience it HERSELF, then I believe it's plausible for her to forget the memories of her mother and the information attached to those memories because they aren't hers. As Wendy goes through her own experiences, her mind has to create room, and so the more she learns through her own eyes, the less she remembers about her mother. (Now I have an explanation, though it's probably not the best one.)