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You may be a preacher, a Sunday school teacher, or just a parent struggling to keep up with your 7-year-old's questions about Scripture. At some time, you've probably felt that your ability to play that role fell short of your aspirations, your best intentions notwithstanding.

Because I have felt those things too, I was delighted to stumble across some new resources which gave my own teaching a little boost. Surprisingly, they weren't books about teaching, but thought-provoking books about filmmaking. Here's why they were so helpful: if your role requires you to understand great narrative, it may be beneficial to consider what it means to create great narrative.

These books on filmmaking increased my passion for narrative by helping me understand and appreciate God's genius for crafting us into his bigger story. What follows are some observations from these books.

Blake Snyder's Save the Cat: the Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need (Michael Wiese Productions, 2005) is written like a text on interpretation in reverse. Screenwriters often ask themselves the same questions interpreters do: how does this story work, and what are its central themes? But in screenwriting, by way of contrast, one isn't interpreting but engineering.

In the world of film, a production starts not with actors or special effects but with a screenplay that lays out the story and foreshadows most of the merits and challenges of the film. And writing a good screenplay requires an understanding of how stories tick, their main categories, how to focus the audience in on the main points, and, how to sum up all of that into a summary sentence, which Snyder calls a "logline." (Sound familiar to anyone who has studied preaching?)

I have been told by many wiser preachers to "stay with the text," meaning "don't run off and think you're ready to preach this before you really know what the text is about." Make sure that, among all your exegetical insights, you do in fact know the story's central point. It's not surprising that screenwriters belabor the same point, but in reverse. They work to make sure that, among all the underlying motifs and catchy one-liners they have written, they have in fact given the story some unmistakable and abiding central plot. As an example, Snyder mentions a logline from Die Hard: "A cop comes to LA to visit his estranged wife and her office building is taken over by terrorists." Whatever else the film does, it must stick to that central storyline. And building in such central, underlying themes makes things easier for everyone.

Snyder's discussion of the major components of any screenplay ("Opening Image," "Bad Guys Close In," etc.) struck me as particularly relevant to Bible teachers. He does an amazing job of showing how virtually every movie I could think of has these different components, and I was particularly intrigued by the underlying spiritual thrust of his categories.

He describes one major component as the "Dark Night of the Soul" moment, which takes place from page 75 to 85 in each screenplay he writes. Even more thought-provoking was his description of a section called "All Is Lost" as the "Christ on the Cross" moment: "It's where the old world, the old character, [or] the old way of thinking dies."

For a person who had never thought so deeply about story-making, especially screenwriting, Save the Cat opened many doors for me. It lays out all the components of a story in a lucid (and often amusing) way.

Did you know that good guys usually enter from the left side of the screen because that is our normal reading direction, and bad guys enter from the right because it strikes us as an odd path of movement? Neither did I, till I read Jennifer Van Sijill's Cinematic Storytelling: The 100 Most Powerful Film Conventions Every Filmmaker Must Know (Michael Wiese Productions, 2005).

Cinematic Storytelling

Van Sijll explains how, using exclusively a camera's movement, positioning, and focus, one can induce viewers to think a certain way about a particular character or development in the story. Even though we have the benefit of sound, each shot—in fact, each movement of any camera—ought to somehow help us understand the story and its characters better.

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