Three-Act Anxiety

Begin at the beginning and end at the end, kid. No one’s going to remember if the middle’s boring, as long as you start with a bang and end with a flourish.

It’s good advice, but the only problem is that the writer still has to drag himself through that middle to get to write the end. Try as one might, there is no magic way to circumvent the task of writing all that bothersome second-act exposition to get to the really meaty confrontations in the third act. If you think that the scenes where characters plant information are hard to watch, try slugging through five or six drafts of each of them to make the dialogue even remotely palpable for the audience. If there was some way to just let the audience know that Dr. Embalmzo’s Radioactive Houseboat is currently harbored in the Bay of Fundy, we’d use it. We don’t want to tell you any more than you want to listen, because exposition is a tedious affair for all involved.

Then there’s the matter of getting every scene to fit. I’m a stickler for narrative coherency in every film, which is why even my favorite movies have moments which continually bug the hell out of me. So each of my scripts goes through a metamorphosis as I write them, losing sub-plots, characters, and sometimes entire narrative tones in my quest to have the whole thing make sense. I can’t go the Raymond Chandler route, allowing one murder to be committed by a completely unknown assailant in order to streamline the narrative; for my nerves to be calmed, all of the pieces have to fit into place.

These thoughts race through my mind as I begin the second draft of my feature script. Having considered the comments of the few people who have seen the first draft, and after reading the thing again myself, I’ve decided to scrap large chunks in favor of fulfilling my own quirks. Actually, I’ve decided to throw out damn near everything except the plot outline. Once this draft is over and finished, I’m sure I’ll look back and find that I’ve benefited from scrapping the entire first go at the material, and that the resulting work is something of which I can be somewhat proud.

Right now I’m hanging on the precipice of the second act. How do these characters change? Who is my modifier? Where does it end? Hell if I know. But I plan to have a good time finding out.