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Why does Steve Harmon want to write his story as a movie?

Steve Harmon is a character that wants to understand not only what is happening to him, but how it happened and why. He also wants to understand himself. Throughout the book, he is constantly asking himself, "who am I, really?" and he finds that he often doesn't have an answer to that simple question. The book starts out with a journal entry in which Steve questions everything that he knows and everything that is happening to him in prison, as he's waiting for the outcome of his trial. He talks about how everything that is happening to him (the crime, the arrest, the sitting in jail, talking with his parents, prosecutors, the judge, and other criminals) feels like a movie that is typical of a regular "prison movie." To him, this is a movie that is about being alone and scared, even in a sea of other people. This gives him the idea to make his own movie, a movie that he can play out in his head, and divide up into scenes. He says on page 4 that, "... to get used to this I will have to give up what I think is real and take up something else. I wish I could make sense of it." This method of writing a script will help him compartmentalize what is happening in his mind.  

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