Love Is Worth the Pain
One of the many great things about our writing workshops is that I could give a cohort the same theme as a prompt, and get mindbogglingly different takes on that theme.
In Megan Park’s witty, moving coming-of-age indie, My Old Ass, eighteen-year old Elliott (Maisy Stella) finds she’s able to communicate with and get guidance from her thirty-nine-year old self (Aubrey Plaza).
**Warning: Major Spoilers Ahead**
Once they get past the initial novelty of this connection, it becomes clear that older Elliott’s goal is to protect her younger self from a mysterious event. Meanwhile, teen Elliott is bent on escaping her provincial life for the glamour of what she’s sure is her future in the big city. Her goal is to find out what happens and what she can look forward to. When older Elliott warns her about a specific boy, teen Elliott naturally finds herself drawn to him, but wonders what awful thing he could do to earn older Elliott’s warning.
At the story’s midpoint, when teen Elliott learns that her dad is selling the farm she’s been so eager to leave, the bedrock of her life shifts under her feet. Older Elliott is right: she’d better enjoy her family and this last scrap of childhood while she can. This bittersweet turn sets the stage for Elliott to mature into the woman she’ll need to be to face her future. She’s gone from a frivolous teen to a grounded young woman.
When older Elliott learns that teen Elliott has in fact fallen in love with the very boy she’s warned against, she’s pushed to reveal to her desperate younger self that her warning was not because of something terrible he does. It is because he dies. Older Elliott has been trying to protect her younger self from the most profound heartbreak imaginable. But, deep in her more open heart, her younger self reaches a profound realization—that it is better to have loved and lost. She will love this boy as much as she can for the time they have together. With clear eyes, she accepts that the love is worth the pain. Meanwhile, having successfully taught her younger self to live in the present, older Elliott is reminded that it’s okay to open your heart, no matter the outcome, and has quite literally healed her inner child. Older Elliott can let go of her pain.
At first blush, the nearest comparison to a coming-of-age dramedy might not be writers Eric Heisserer and Ted Chaing’s ambitious sci-fi thriller, Arrival. But in Amy Adams’ searing performance as Louise Banks, a scientist who must find a way to communicate with extraterrestrials, she comes face-to-face with the very same heartbreak as Elliott. Nevertheless, she chooses to have a child with Jeremy Renner’s Ian Donnelly, despite knowing that they will lose the child and that he will leave her when he discovers that the extraterrestrials have shown her this inevitable future.
Both My Old Ass and Arrival ask the question: if you knew how very deeply it will hurt to lose the person you love most in the world prematurely, would you love them anyway or would you choose to protect yourself? In both films, the life-affirming answer is: choose love. These two films are a great example of how completely different stories can spring from the same theme.
We don’t often start with theme when we sit down to crack a new script. We often start from character need and situations that might create a journey to fulfill those needs. As with finding the central line of a story that might reveal its heart, theme is something we often see best after a first draft is complete. My guess is that there is a single theme that runs through many a given writer’s work. For example, I only discovered after writing projects in genres from RomCom to Family Adventure to Historical Drama that my theme always centers around misfits who defy convention to find where they belong.
Disparate scripts might share a theme despite having little else in common. Have you discovered whether you have a through-line theme in your scripts? Do you always have a different one in each script, or do you gravitate to certain kinds of stories that explore different aspects of the same theme?
We invite you to look for a through-line in your own work. It can help crystallize your ideas. It can also help in defining for others what kind of a writer you are, which is especially useful in a pitch meeting.
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Your next project is worth it.