The following is a chapter from Katherine Atwell Herbert's book The Perfect Screenplay: Writing and Selling It (Allworth Press). This excerpt particularly applies to those of you who have experienced self-doubt, a loss of momentum...you know, everybody. (Don't pretend like it hasn't happened to you.) If you're interested in reading more of Katherine's tips, check out her book here.

Perhaps you have told people, maybe your family included, that you are writing a screenplay, and they picture you sitting at a computer putting the words on paper like a typist.

People who don't write or have never been around working writers often think that once writers get an idea, they simply sit down and start typing it onto the page, stopping only to remember a particular word or hesitating after a sentence here and there to catch their breath and reread their work. The ideas in their heads come out as fully realized scenes, sentences, and dialogue-just as it was in your head.

More sophisticated people know that writers are required to think about what they're going to write, plan it, and make dozens of notes as ideas occur to them.

Writers like you know the reality. You are personally acquainted to the meanspirited sprites that dance on your head and in front of your eyes when you sit down to write. Without warning they appear, paralyzing your typing fingers or creating havoc with the wiring in your imagination.

INTRODUCING YOUR PERSONAL SPRITES

Among the sprites that can arrive at your desk before you do are the spirits of the material itself. They roost on your monitor and bedevil you with self-doubt and story problems.

Act two of your screenplay is one of the places where these evil ectoplasmicdefying elves get pretty rowdy. You got act one. You got the story set up, introduced the hero, and created the event that forced your hero into taking action. If it went well, you wrote with some ease through the climax of this act.

Now you're facing down act two and the material is getting thinner than a runway model. What are you going to do until you get to the climax? Act two sinks many a writer, at least temporarily. It is the tough one to write. It is the act that develops character and plot, complicates everything, lets us in on some of the stuff under the surface, takes a peek here and there, and sets us up for act three and the big finale. Some scripts simply sputter out at about page forty-five or seventy or sixty-three when the story gauge hits empty.

If this is the sprite that's pinned you down, get to your outline immediately and rethink it. Movies don't go directly from opening to climax. So, if that's as far as you've gotten in developing your screenplay, then you still have a piece of work to do. Instead of sitting at the computer hoping the yellow brick road will magically materialize and lead you to Oz, you'd better get the mortar mixed so you can lay down your own throughway to act three.

Let's look at an example: A teenager's family moves to a new town and he has to enroll at a new high school. You know how to set all this up in act one, and maybe you've planned to have the climax of the first act be the boy's encounter with his antagonist. Act three will focus on the boy realizing that although he's
tried and failed (act two), he now knows exactly what he has to do to achieve his goals that were set up in act one.

You've probably already decided where you want the boy to be by the final page. There are a dozen goals that he can pursue in this particular overworked concept. Is the boy looking for acceptance? Learning a new teen culture? Getting the girl he wants? Beating the school bully? Exposing the school punks as dope pushers? Making the team? Passing the math test and getting accepted at a good college?

If you can't get through act two with this material, you probably haven't developed it thoroughly. First, examine all the possible complications that could occur to the boy as he pursues his quest. Make a list of all the things that could or might happen. If, for example, the boy is trying to achieve acceptance at this new school, what might prevent that? What might aid that? The growing conflict in each act isn't a simple arc; positive and negative events happen that eventually push the characters to the climax. Where does the boy go for solace during his fight? Do you have a character who fulfills that need? How could the subplot be worked into the primary plot? What other problems does the boy have? Consider developing texturizing subplots that provide more complication and cultural variety to the main plot and/or add color and depth to the characters. For examples, watch Crash or About a Boy. In this story idea, there are lots of subplot possibilities. For example, what about the boy's relationship with his parents? What about their problems in this new town with new jobs? What does the boy do when he's not at school? What about the antagonist's activities? What about positive things the boy discovers as he marches toward his goal? Watch Rebel Without a Cause.

In the second act, let the audience get to know the protagonist a little better. Think of the last half-dozen films you've seen. It's generally in act two that the hero finally beds, or at least falls for, the love interest. And it is usually in this act that we get to know the personal side of the hero. We might see his other relationships, or we learn what he's really interested in pursuing after he dispatches the bad guys.

If act two is getting to you, sit down and rework, enlarge, and refine your outline. It will give you some guidance. Remember, though, don't pad it. The audience will know immediately that the plot's going nowhere and that those longwinded conversations you've included have no effect on the development of the plot. Keep anything extraneous, any irrelevant fluff, out of your work. Tight
scripts are the ones analysts can't put down.

Maybe act two isn't your problem. Maybe in act one you've got a great opening scene and an unbeatable incident to launch the story. But you can put it all on paper in seven pages. Since act ones are usually somewhere between twenty-five and thirty pages, sometimes shorter-say eighteen or nineteen in action and comedy scripts-you've got a problem.

You should probably go back and write a good biography of your main characters and the antagonists. Review all the roles in this story of yours, make notes on all of them. Also, review what ability, quality, skill, or effort your protagonist will use to prevail in the climatic scene that resolves the story. That characteristic or that ability needs to be introduced early on. In many major films, that talent is introduced in the big opening scene of the movie. And don't slack on the setup. We need to see where this hero lives, how he lives, who he lives with, and the general outline of his life. Show us, particularly, his reaction to whatever happens to him that will bring him to a decision about the action he must take following the inciting incident.

In War of the Worlds, the audience is immediately introduced to Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) and very quickly learns something of his life, i.e., what he does for a living, where he lives, his marital status, and his relationship with his children. We also are shown that he is a man of conviction and some stubbornness-even if it only applies to refusing to work overtime so he can get home in time to meet his ex-wife and children. When his sense of resolve is called upon later in the film, we know he has this quality because it had been set up in those opening scenes.

Then, too, some writers agonize over act one because they've heard that producers and agents only read act one. Don't you believe it. They only read five to ten pages. But, now that you're even more concerned, focus on your story first. Goose up the first ten pages in the rewrites.

Maybe act three is your challenge. You just don't know how you want this story to end. You're having a lot of fun with these characters but you are not sure what will happen to them. You should know. Even if you change the content and the resolution of act three midway through your writing, you should know. If you don't, you probably haven't really thought about the direction of your story. You need to ask yourself again, "What problem does my hero have to solve, or what question does he need to answer, or what quest does he have to take, or what goal does he have to reach?" Once you remind yourself of your original design, it gives the entire script a direction. It doesn't matter whether or not the hero succeeds or fails; you know where he has to go. Remember Orange County? The hero wanted to get into Stanford. When it looked like all was lost to him, including his girlfriend, he met the professor-writer he idealized and realized he didn't need to go to Stanford to become the writer he was hoping to become. So, he failed to get into the college he wanted to attend, which was his original quest, but he discovered something much more important and the climax
occurred on cue, just as it should have.

Office Space followed a similar pattern. The protagonist hates his job, and when he decides to let himself get fired, he gets promoted. The story follows a discernable dramatic arc. The hero decides to get the best of this heartless and joyless company. But after the series of events in act two, he discovers something important about himself; the spirit-deadening, poorly managed company gets what it deserves; and the hero finds a new job that he enjoys and sees the value of.

SPRITES TWO

It isn't just act two that can get you down and keep you from finishing. And it isn't always the material itself. Sometimes it's what happens when you write. The mischievous sprites invite their evil brothers over to plague you. They pop out and sit on your shoulder. They create such a racket that it's almost impossible to write. It's no wonder lots of writers take to drink.

You become unsure of everything you put on the page. You thought it was a great idea when it came to you. You loved it when you rolled it around in your head. You felt clever when you worked out the story. But now a creeping discontent, an unnamed worry is making its way across your neural synapses. Every word you write seems like the worst choice imaginable. The plot points you developed sit on the page as the least intriguing ideas you could have chosen, but nothing else comes to mind. You describe your characters and the words sneer at you. You wish you had paid more attention to that teacher who encouraged you to build your vocabulary. How could you fall so short of your own expectations?

You come to the conclusion that this story is the stupidest idea ever conceived. You visualize what will happen if you give it to any of your friends to read. They will meet up at the local coffee bar and spend the evening laughing their heads off at your ridiculous idea, your terrible writing, and your completely incomprehensible characters. You can't even let yourself imagine what an agent and his assistants will do.

You decide that the whole project, idea, and execution are the worst things ever brought forth from any currently functioning imagination. You wonder whether or not to shred the whole thing and look for work clerking at Wal-Mart or cleaning Holiday Inns.

Good, honest, physical labor has its blessings. One of them is the absence of self-doubt. It's not something you'll achieve as a writer; only the mediocre, and maybe the geniuses, are satisfied with what they write.

If you don't dispose of your script, you eventually begin to wonder if there's anything worth salvaging in it. You wish you could go back to the day you loved this idea. It's like falling in love. At the beginning it's new and heady. But now that you're getting to know your lover, serious doubts creep in, like a dense and choking fog.

Where do you go when these gremlins dance with wild abandon all around you? Take a pass on all the psychoanalysis handed down from the psychiatrists and psychologists in the first six decades of the twentieth century and all the pop psychobabble of the latter four. Sit down at your word processor. Let the little devils have their say for about ten or twenty minutes while you play hearts or solitaire or type repeatedly, "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy." Then tell them to go to hell; swallow hard and press on, promising yourself a complete and thorough rewrite of this drivel when you reach the final page. Paste Eleanor Roosevelt's words, "You must do the thing you think you cannot do," across the top of your monitor.

It's almost inevitable that your feelings will change again before you get to the end of your script. And there is a very good chance you'll feel better about the material later.

THE GREMLIN IS HOLDING YOUR ENDING FOR RANSOM

Have you met people who have never finished their doctoral dissertation? Or people who dropped out of high school just weeks before graduation? Or students who drop out of med school before they finish?

There is something about finishing. We all live on dreams. But once you finish a script, polish it, and dress it up for public presentation, the dream is laid to rest, replaced with sobering reality. Not only have you committed your imaginings to paper, with all the pain and pleasure that entailed, but now the story is no longer your private domain. It hardly belongs to you at all. You will get unwanted and unsought comments. People you try to sell it to will want to change it-a little or a lot. Your secret pleasure is gone and it can never belong exclusively to you again. Lots of writers just don't finish. They get into it maybe sixty or eighty pages and simply can't get themselves to continue, despite having act two worked out.

One way to handle this impasse is to put the thing away for awhile. Later, after you've emotionally separated from it, you can go back and take a fresh look at it. If you still like it enough to devote some more time to it, you will probably be able to finish it with clear-eyed dispassion. Conversely, you might pick it up at a later time and realize it isn't worth finishing. This script was a learning exercise. It served its purpose in your development as a writer. There's no need to finish it. Put it back in the bottom drawer. When you become rich and successful and studios are clamoring for more material from you, you can pull that one out, give it an ending, and go on with your next project.

ANOREXIC LITTLE DEVILS

A fourth kind of devil that occasionally haunts writers is in many ways the most fearsome. Occasionally you get deep into your material and you find it's running thin. You've reworked the outline and you've added material, yet it seems to be evaporating faster than a desert mirage.

It's not unusual for a college freshman to plan to discuss the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in an eight-page paper; writers sometimes try the opposite approach. They think their sensible little story will consume 120 pages. You've probably seen movies based on video games or television series, which are criticized for being short on plot. Some writers of thirty-minute stories can't, according to the critics, conceive a story that has enough plot to last 105 to 120 minutes. Sometimes plot-bare movies are referred to as one-joke stories. Remember the movie Blind Date? It had one joke, and it was one with whiskers on it. So there will be times when, despite writing careful outlines and taking mental vacations, nothing you do makes your idea work as a full-length feature film, or an hour-long television series episode. You've run it out. There's not much you can do but set it aside. Sooner or later, at the most unexpected moment, you'll be shaken by an epiphany and you will know instantly how to rework the story. Then again, unless you want to try a script consultant or get some fellow writers whom you respect to help you, maybe this project will just have to collect dust until the pages crackle and fall away.

Not to worry. You'll fall in love with another idea very soon and will be off on a new adventure.