Confirmation or Trickster?

Several weeks ago, my agent emailed me asking is I would be interested in writing a novelization. This kind of book is a novel based on a movie script. Rob has written a number of them, including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  My agent emailed the script and said that if it interested me, I should write 25 pages from the script showing how I would turn it into a novel. It would then be submitted to the producers and, if they liked it, he would do his best to get me the gig.

The script was 125 pages long. That meant that for it to become a novel, one page of script – a minute of film –  would need to become at least 3 pages of a novel. It meant I would have to fill in the character’s background. What’s her past? How does she think? What motivates her? Since a script is done mostly through dialogue, it meant I would have to show who she is within herself, what she thinks about, obsesses about, what her past is like. To do this, the first person voice – I – seemed be the best point of view to use.

The first eight pages of the script – which would be the basis for the first 25 pages of the novel – follow a young American woman through her first day in the U.K. There’s a natural break at the top of page 8 of the script, so I decided that would be the ideal place to end my 25 pages. I then read the entire script to get a sense of the character and how she evolves through the course of the movie.

The protagonist is a year younger than my daughter, so I could identify with her journey. I was specifically looking for something in her past that I could carry forward through the story. Rob had suggested this and I found it. She lost her father when she was really young and after his death, her mother told him that if she ever wanted to talk to him, she should write a message to him against the sky and he would see it. She does this several times in the script, so I seized on this and used it a couple of times in my 25 pages.

After Rob had read through the pages, I tweaked it and sent it off. That was on  a Friday. Sunday evening, we took Noah to the dog park and I was talking with Diana, a woman who had been one of Rob’s yoga students. Her husband was diagnosed with liver cancer last year, has had extensive surgery, and is doing better now. They had recently spent three weeks  in Alaska and had just gotten back yesterday. On the flights out there and back, she said, she had watched an emotionally wrenching film about a young man with cancer who falls in love with a woman who has a disability.

“This movie really touched me. I can’t remember the name of the film, though, Trish. Do you know which movie I’m talking about?”

I stood there for a moment, stunned. “It’s called Our Fault in the Stars, and it’s based on a novel by John Green.”

The movie was produced by Temple Hill Entertainment, the same company that is looking for a writer to novelize the script that my agent sent me. So what are the odds on this?  I hadn’t seen Diana at the dog park in months, I hadn’t mentioned the possible project to her or anyone else except Rob and Megan, and I haven’t read Our Fault in the Stars or seen the movie.  The only reason I know about the book is because after my agent emailed me, I looked up the production company and the book. And there were dozens of people at the dog park today and I could have spoken to any of them.

As we left the dog park, I remarked to Rob that the synchro is either a confirmation that I’ll get the project – or a big trickster synchro if I don’t. I’ve experienced several synchros that seemed to be confirmations and turned out to be tricksters. However it unfolds, it’s the sort of synchronicity that invariably leaves me wondering about the power of what quantum physicist David Bohm referred to as the “implicate” or enfolded order in the underlying, deeper reality of our lives.

In other words, who or what orchestrates this stuff, anyway?