Go Into The Story Resource: The Theology of Screenwriting

A 25-part series that considers theological concepts as metaphors for significant psychological themes writers can use in their stories.

On May 16, 2018, Go Into The Story turned 10 years old — you can read the very first blog post here. I led with this paragraph:

Welcome to Go Into The Story! Right now, it’s nothing but a humble, threadbare blog, but I hope it will evolve into an active resource for aspiring screenwriters, as well as a community for anyone interested in storytelling and the creative life.

And evolve it did! To the point where it was recently named “Best of the Best” Scriptwriting Website in the 20th Annual Writer’s Digest Best Websites for Writers list.

To celebrate 10 years of blogging about screenwriting, writing, Hollywood, movies, TV, and the creative life, each day in May, I’m going to feature a piece of Go Into The Story trivia, plus a writing resource you can find in the site’s archives. This is not an exercise in self-congratulations so much as I figured readers could use some tips about how to best use the site. With — to date — 24,140 articles and over 100 archive topics, there is a LOT of content here. Hopefully, these posts for the next 31 days will clue in more recent followers and remind long-time readers about resources you can use to facilitate deepening your understanding of the writing craft.

Today’s trivia: Here is the very first comment someone posted in response to my very first post:

JohnC at 2008–05–18 14:45:00:

This is so great to see, Scott. I just know this is going to help me kick-start further development of a lot of ideas I have floating around!

Although I haven’t kept count, I’d guess the site has probably had 100K+ comments from readers. I’ve featured quite a few in blog posts due to the quality of the observations. The Go Into The Story community has been a strong one and continues to be.

Today’s Go Into The Story resource: The Theology of Screenwriting.

Given my background — B.A., University of Virginia, Religious Studies, M.Div., Yale University —I supposed it stands to reason I would look at Story through a theological lens. But it’s more than that. One of the primary reasons religions exist is to attempt to provide answers to the Big Questions: Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Why is there evil? Why do good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people? Do we have free will or are we ruled by fate? Who am I? What will I become? How can I live with the prospect of death?

In my view, stories traffic in the same territory, so it figures that what we might consider to be theological themes —Temptation, Grace, Incarnation — are present in all stories. Indeed, the #1 movie in the IMDb Top 250 is The Shawshank Redemption.

Here are 25 theological themes I explored in a series looking at them in popular movies:

Annunciation
Baptism
Chosen
Congregation
Conversion
Cross
Despair
Doubt
Doubt
Evil
Faith
Forgiveness
Grace
Guilt
Hell
Incarnation
Kingdom of God
Predestination
Purgatory
Redemption
Revelation
Righteousness
Salvation
Sin
Temptation

Each day this month, I want to take the opportunity to thank you for supporting Go Into The Story. I’d love to hear from you in RESPONSES. When did you start following the blog? What are your favorite features? And as always, if you have any suggestions, feel free to suggest away.