What is it with the second act of a screenplay that puts the brakes on the creative process? It usually takes me 10 times longer to do the second act than the first and third. Right now, I've got a script that sat idle for a year so that I could concentrate on two others.
Now those are done, and it's time to get back to a screenplay with a very nice concept. It would be a whole lot better prospect if gasoline prices rose to $4 again. I've spent about three weeks just avoiding working on it at all. It's there looming in its own little file on my computer. I've even thought of ditching it for a while longer in favor of some other idea for a story.
The real problem is that I know it's a nice concept, and I probably have at least one person in the industry to give it a read. Today the answer to my sticking point came to me out of nowhere. I had a protagonist in a somewhat similar situation as Harrison Ford in The Fugitive. He's a fugitive from justice and worse. But a former love interest figures out he's been set-up and finds him at a place that holds sentimental value to the protag.
That's where I've been stuck right at the turning point in Act 2. Today it came to me. He ditches her, rather than let her be drawn further into very real danger. The script can pretty much be finished now, because the end is almost always in my head when working on the first act. Sometimes the end and third act changes a bit, but it's about 75% done in my head.
My last script, Someone Is Watching, has a nice ending that pretty much turned out like I wanted. Any differences only added to how the 3rd act worked. If you're reading this and want to read that script or any others, simply drop me an email.
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