TRANSCRIPT

So I'd like to share another tip that I find super useful, and that honestly I didn't work out for a while. I came to this tip by struggling to teach students how to maintain the tension in the first and second half of Act II. It can be really hard, there's a lot of defined moments that need to happen in Act I, and the same in Act III. Act III moves really quickly towards completion, but Act II is long. It's why a lot of people call it the “graveyard act,” you know, where writers go to die. We lose our passion, we drop the story. Often stories have a good beginning and a strong end but they have a really slow middle, and I was trying to ask myself, “What can I do? How can I help students in my classes avoid the pitfalls of Act II?” I realized in going back to the drawing board that what’s key here is the motivation and desire line of character. Now of course, that's the case in every scene you ever write, but what if—instead of thinking of the first half of Act II as a process of pushing towards one goal, and then the second half of Act II as a process of pushing towards one goal—what if I broke each half of Act II into smaller goals?

For example, let's say I need to get to the mountain in order to find the plans to go to the lost city. Then maybe first I have to get together a guide and a crew to help take me to the mountain, but we're going to have to go by boat, so I've also got to get a boat, and then I’ve got to sail across the ocean and overcome various obstacles. Each one of those parts creates a unique desire line and a goal that can be met and fraught with difficulty. In other words, I can make it hard to accomplish that goal. Same in the second half of Act II. Now that I have the plans, I've gotten to the mountain, I have to go and find the treasure, but maybe my boat was destroyed and so I have to find a new way to travel, and when I find a new way to travel, I get lost, and I have to find my way out of the wood, and then once I find my way out of the wood, I have to overcome a trap that's been set by the antagonist to stop me from pursuing my final goal of getting the treasure. Each one of those mini-goals gives me a sort of little mini series of scenes—a sequence—to write that allows me to focus on this one little unit of the story, so that I don't get overwhelmed by the whole.

This is a principal I learned in talking to a great entrepreneur once. I asked them, “How do you bite off more than you can chew, and keep going?” and they told me, you know, it’s a lot like climbing Everest. The people who fail to summit Everest, he said—I don't know this from personal experience because I haven't done it—the people who fail to summit Everest are constantly thinking of having to climb to the peak of Mount Everest, whereas he said, “I got up every morning and thought about climbing a hill outside my own backyard.” Aside from the altitude and maybe the difficulty of the terrain, you don't need that much more skill set to climb Everest than you do to climb a hill outside your backyard. It's just that every day, once you’ve climbed a hill, you have to climb another hill, and you have to keep going.

So that's my tip for you in overcoming the drudgery of writing, the psychological turmoil of writing Act II. Think of mini-goals to give your character. Think of mini-goals to set yourself as a writer and work on each of those episodes separately. This usually means that I end up with three little goals or desire lines that fit into my overarching trajectory for the first half of Act II, and then the same for the second half. Three or four at the most. You don't want to have too many episodes to where it becomes entirely episodic and you're jumping from one adventure to the next. Break it into units, work on the unit, for a moment forget about the overarching story and just keep on writing, keep on swimming. You can always fine tune later. What we really want to do at this point, now that you're hitting the writing process, is we want to get you through the end of your first draft so that you can sit down and revise it. Good luck!

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