TRANSCRIPT

The threshold of the first act, so what I mean by that is the transition from Act I to Act II, is so exciting to me because it's the moment that my protagonist gets to have full agency. Throughout the first act, I like to think of the protagonist as being invited into the journey of the story, but they're going to have to make the commitment. They're going to have to decide to step up. They're going to have to decide to go on this journey or to respond to the quest for love or to take their school to the national championship. This is the moment where the protagonist steps up and says, “Yes, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this even though I don't fully understand what it really means yet. Even though I probably am going to be sad at some point that I decided to go on this journey and it's going to beat me into the ground.” (Laughs) I mean, as a creative you know what that means: “Whoa, if only I knew what I’ve gotten myself into!” So this is the moment where you respond with enthusiasm: “Yes! Let's do this. Let's make that film. Let's make that documentary. Let's go on set. Let's learn how to use the camera.” And then you realize: “Whoa, this is harder than I thought.” But the joy and the agency and the sense of duty and purpose that you feel at that moment of responding to the quest is just unparalleled. I mean, it has to be one of the heights of the human experience to say, “I'm setting my mind to this and I'm going to do it,” and that's the lesson I want you to remember about this threshold.

Wherever your protagonist is, whatever type of story you’re trying to tell, as you break from Act I into Act II, nobody can give that protagonist a hand and say, “Come with me.” They have to say, “I think you should go on this journey. I want you to go on this journey, but the choice is yours.” It’s that powerful of a moment. The choice is yours, and again, if you do not make the choice to move forward the film will end, right? That's the whole point of one of the Muppets movies when they did the reboot. If Kermit won't get the gang back together, there will be no movie, and they make jokes about that in the screenplay and in the film itself.

So why is it exciting to me? It's exciting to me because it's the first time the protagonist really steps into their power and in a sense, by taking this course and by committing to work through each and every one of these steps, you're crossing that threshold too. Whether you're a veteran writer who is wanting to hone their skills and get even better than you were before or learn some new tricks or to push yourself from somebody else's perspective, or whether you're a total newbie who's entering this extraordinary world of writing for the first time, the threshold is the moment where you say, “This is for me. Nobody is going to do it except for me, and at this point in time, even if I'm not sure what it entails, I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get there.” Wow! If we could all get up every day and live like that, what would the world be like? The threshold is one of the most exciting places that you find in a story because here, for the first time, the protagonist knows that the only way forward is through and they're willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

You know, I’ve gone through some really hard personal times, and I think that writers all drawn on that, like the source of where we feel our emotions, and I could easily have given up.

It can be easy to look at me and think, “Oh, she has it all figured out,” or “she's been on this trajectory and she's always known this is what she wants to do.” That's not true. I've been through some pretty tough times. I've had to rely on friends and family to usher me through them, and my point in sharing this is so that you know that every decision I've made, every moment where I've decided to cross the threshold in my personal life, including pushing forward and struggling through the process of being a writer, has been worth it.

I've never been so alive since I crossed that threshold myself. Was I afraid? Yes. Did it feel like a risk? Absolutely. Would I do it again? Yes. I suppose the lesson here is that we're never going to be fully alive until we are embracing our calling, and the moment that we choose to take the risk to embrace that calling and to free fall into the great unknown into the extraordinary world is very liberating, but we don't know how liberating it is until we're on the other side of the threshold. So that kind of apprehension, that's what it means to write what you know. You know, to think about your own experience and to bring that emotional tension to a scene. To go back to a place where you felt the difficulty of saying, “Yes, I commit,” and to empathizing with your character, to having compassion for them, for remembering what it’s like to be there and to not want to make the leap. Yeah, I guess I’ve crossed lots of thresholds in life, and you probably have too, and if you haven't yet, you will, but looking back there's not only life on the other side of the threshold, there's maybe the only life that's suitable for us to flourish. So I'm glad I took the leap and I think every protagonist is too, even if they're going to hit a point later in the story where they regret it temporarily, it's always worth it.

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