Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi
Premise: (from Black List) A young black girl’s family in 1960s Mississippi decides to harbor two human-looking refugees who have mysteriously fallen from the sky.
About: Today’s screenplay is a double-whammy! It was one of the 2017 Nicholl Screenwriting Competition winners AND it made the Black List, with 12 votes. Sarah Jane Inwards, the writer, studied screenwriting at Northwestern, then moved to LA as soon as she graduated, working as close to the industry as she could (doing everything from reality TV to PA’ing), writing as much as possible in the meantime. This is her breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Sarah Jane Inwards
Details: 116 pages

A lot of writers send comedies and fantasies and thrillers to Nicholl then e-mail me and ask why their scripts never advance. The reason they don’t advance is because the Nicholl doesn’t celebrate marketable screenwriting. They celebrate screenwriting that is thematically driven, that explores the human condition, and that tackles social issues. If you can find an interesting way into one of those stories, your script will not only advance. It will win.

Which is why I’m not surprised at all that Jellyfish Summer was one of the fine winners in last year’s Nicholl contest. The script explores racism in an extremely unique way.

With that said, it’s a bizarre script, the kind of script I’d read and say, “This writer has talent but the script is all over the place. She needs guidance.” And, in the Nicholl’s defense, that’s what they do. They guide their winners after they win. Still, I’m not sure all the parts add up to a whole here. Let’s take a look.

10 year old Maise Ray, older sister Rebecca, older brother, Zeke, and mother, Mama Delilah, are a black family living in Mississippi in 1965. But this isn’t like the 1965 of our history books. In this 1965, people keep falling from the sky. Literally. Families of 3 and 4 plunge to the ground in little space capsules. They are known as the “Fallen.”

Everyone – whites and blacks – hate the Fallen. As soon as they land, they get rounded up and placed in encampments. One day a couple of Fallen kids plunge into the nearby ocean and Mama Delilah rescues them. Because Mama knows that the authorities will place the kids in the camps, she hides them in her house.

However, after Maise accidentally mentions the kids to someone in town, the KKK come, burn the house down, and hang Mama and the older Fallen boy on a nearby tree. If you’re wondering how the KKK got involved, you’re not the only one. Maise, older brother Zeke, and younger Fallen boy, Skinny, set their sights on getting to Mobile, where there’s an “underground railroad” for the Fallen.

Whereas Maise believes that they must help the Fallen at all costs, Zeke is perfectly fine with getting rid of the Fallen. But then Maise meets a Fallen girl who’s a mirror image of herself. They realize that the Fallen people are them, just from a parallel universe. Armed with this new information, they must travel to a nearby town where Martin Luther King is speaking and give him this information before Congress votes to kill all of the Fallen.

Whoa.

There is a lot going on here.

And that’s Jellyfish Summer’s biggest problem. It has something to say. But it’s throwing so much at us that the message gets lost.

I liked the beginning of the script, a clever commentary on racism, which is that every race is capable of it. It wasn’t hitting us over the head with “White people = racist” like most of the scripts tackling racism these days. It makes you think about racism from a different perspective. That was cool.

But the mythology was so wonky, so all over the place, that, over time, I lost track of what the script was about. For example, at first, the Fallen are white people. But then they’re also black people and Mexican people. Which is fine. But it starts muddying the waters on where the racism is supposed to be focused.

From there, you had the KKK. The KKK were against the Fallen. But they were also against black people. Once again, you’re dividing the focus. When groups have multiple targets, we’re not sure what we’re supposed to be taking from their attacks.

Then we find out the Fallen are carbon copies of us from a parallel dimension, so we’re throwing this weird sci-fi element into the mix. Not to mention that, apparently, them being copies of us is the key to stopping racism across the planet. I wasn’t clear why that was the case. Then, of course, you have Maise running into Martin Luther King and him giving her a five page monologue about doing the right thing in life. That’s when I threw up my hands and asked, what’s going on anymore??

I’ll be honest. This felt like a bunch of ideas in search of a story.

But I think the biggest error in Jellyfish Summer was the mythology. In order for any mythology to work, it needs to be simple and clear. There’s no faster way to sink a mythology-dependent screenplay than murky mythology. It’s like the difference between The Matrix, where the mythology was painstakingly laid out so that you understood every single nuance before they moved forward, and a movie like The Cloverfield Paradox, where the mythology was literally, “Anything goes” with no explanation for half the things that happened. Which is why that movie is considered a train wreck.

Now I don’t think Jellyfish Summer is a train wreck. But I wish the writer would’ve stayed with the simplified world she started with. The Fallen were stand-ins for black people in the 60s. And we explored racism through the unique lens of black people being racists towards these beings.

One of the best plot threads in the story is Zeke, who hates the Fallen. Whereas his family wants to save every last one of them, Zeke looks to march with those who want to kill the Fallen. When we see him finally turn and get the warm and fuzzies, that’s what good screenwriting is all about.

But by adding the KKK, a hierarchy of racism, and a really confusing mythology, it muddied the waters to the point where I didn’t know what this script was supposed to be saying.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Always err on the side of simple. The fastest way to lose your script is to overcomplicate it. I’d say that’s what happened here.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I heard that there was such a battle over making United States of Fucking Awesome one of the 2014 Nicholl winners, that several Nicholl judges threatened to quit if it was given the top prize. THAT, my friends, is how much the Nicholl hates comedies. And thrillers. And fantasy. And straight sci-fi. The Nicholl is the #1 place for screenwriters who love drama. Who love social issues. Who love exploring the human condition. Who love issues having to do with race and identity. Who love topical issues that are affecting the world. If you have one of those scripts, the Nicholl is your place to go. Otherwise, you probably want to stay away.

Genre: TV Pilot – 1 Hour Drama
Premise: (from IMDB) A young guy from Long Beach joins a local fraternal group, Lodge 49.
About: Today’s pilot comes from brand spanking newcomer Jim Gavin, a 38 year old who grew up in Long Beach and used to work in plumbing, which plays a prominent role in one of the characters lives of Lodge 49. The series is premiering on AMC’s new streaming service. It’s executive produced by Paul Giamatti and stars Kurt Russell’s son, Wyatt Russell.
Writer: Jim Gavin
Details: 60 pages

One of the most common criticisms I give screenwriters goes something like this:

“Where the F is the concept??!”

You can’t write about nothing, or next to nothing, and expect people to get excited about it.

But writers keep doing it. Why? Because there are always a couple of successful “zero concept” projects they can point to. “But Boring Show 1 is still on the air, Carson.” “Oh but Carson, Nothing Happens Movie 2 made a lot of money.”

To this I say… you’re right. There are examples of shows and movies out there that don’t have a concept to hang their hat on.

HOWEVER!

How tiny your concept is, is indirectly proportional to how lucky you have to get. So go ahead and write something that doesn’t have a selling point. It’s just characters or it’s just people in a small town trying to live life. You can write that. But the further you are away from a genuine hook, the more your success will depend on luck.

Which brings us to today.

Lodge 49 isn’t about anything.

Well, it’s about something. Sort of. A former surfer living in Long Beach joins an adult club of people who occasionally get together for drinks.

Exactly.

As soon as it became clear to me that that’s all this script was about, I had to find out how it got made. Because this is the secret sauce, guys. You must take stock of how people break in to see if it’s something that could work for you. All it takes is one success story that you think you can replicate to motivate you.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how this writer got anyone to pay attention to his pilot. This is his first known project. He’s got no IMDB credits. What happened here? I have a theory. Looking back, it turns out Jim Gavin wrote a short story book called Middle Men in 2013. It was not a best seller and virtually nobody knows about it (it has 62 reviews on Amazon).

But here’s what agents love to do. Agents love to send out books. It’s one of their favorite things. They send them to out out to writers, to directors, to actors. Everyone’s mass sending these things out, hoping to spark the interest of someone with an actual name, someone who can get a project going.

I suspect that Middle Men landed in Paul Giamatti’s hand as a potential movie project. He didn’t think there was a movie there. However, he liked the writing. So he met with Jim and asked him if he had any other ideas. A TV show perhaps. Jim pitched him Lodge 49, and Giamatti decided to shepherd it.

For all of you wondering, this is one possibility for how a show without a concept gets made.

Now a lot of this is admittedly speculation. But this is how a ton of deals go down. Someone likes something you wrote. They want to meet with you. They tell you they didn’t flip for the script/book, but they like your writing. If you’re prepared for these meetings with several pitches, you can cash out. Which I suspect was the case here.

That’s a lot of chit-chat for a show I haven’t even broken down yet. So maybe now’s the time to tell you that I actually liked this pilot!

Sean “Dud” Dudley lives in the bastard of Los Angles beach communities, Long Beach. Dud isn’t living day to day. He’s living hour to hour. The Lebowski-adjacent 30 year old recently got kicked out of his apartment cause he couldn’t pay the rent. And he’s sold nearly everything he owns to the local pawn shop in order to eat. If Dud doesn’t turn his life around soon, he’s in some major shit.

Meanwhile, 60 year old degenerate gambler Ernie Fontaine is in almost as bad of a shape as Dud is. I guess he’s in worse shape cause he’s got 30 years on him. The lifelong plumber bets away every dime he has and is about to get a visit from some bad men to remind him of just how much money he owes.

Dud, a former surfer, is so desperate for cash, he’s searching for lost jewelry on the beach with a metal detector. And that’s when he finds a gold ring with a strange symbol on it. He shows it to the pawn shop owner, who tells Dud it belongs to a club called “The Lynx.” They’ve been around since the 50s and are sort of a… I guess adult fraternity is the best way to put it.

Curious, Dud heads to the Lynx, where he meets Ernie. Yes, it turns out Ernie is a member! Dud feels a deep connection with the Lynx, that it could be the key to getting his life back on track. So he begs Ernie to let him become a member. “Sure,” Ernie says. “You’re a member.” Apparently, it’s very easy to become a Lynx.

And that’s pretty much the pilot.

I know, right?

That’s all.

So why did I like it?

Okay, so here’s the thing. If you’re going to write a show about a loser, we have to love that loser. Especially if there isn’t a whole lot going on plot-wise. Gavin nails the formula for making us love Dud.

1) The system has to have screwed the hero over some way. Dud was kicked out of his family home, the place he loves more than anything.

2) He has to be funny. Dud is hilarious in that understated stoner way. For example, when he walks into the gas station after scrounging through his car for every available coin to pay for gas, he dumps $4.23 on the attendant’s counter. Then, just as he turns to leave, he sees a penny on the floor. “Nice!” he says, picking it up and placing it on the pile. “I’d like to add this to my purchase.”

3) He has to keep fighting. If you turn this character into a woe-is-me? We’ll hate him. We only root for heroes that fight, even when the chips are down. Dud is determined to get his life back on track.

When you nail the lead character in a TV show, it gives you a lot of leniency. Because even though the plot was mostly boring, I enjoyed every scene Dud was in. I was curious what he was going to say or do next.

With that said, Gavin could’ve done himself a huge favor and added a Scriptshadow Staple. What do you do if you’re writing a character piece that doesn’t have a lot of plot?

Drop in a dead body.

Give us a murder.

A local murder could’ve juiced this pilot up so much.

As it stands, I suspect Gavin will run into trouble stretching this out to 10 episodes. When you’re struggling to get enough story into a pilot, that’s telling me you’re going to run into major problems come the 3rd and 4th episodes. We need things that the characters are moving towards. Mysteries that need to be solved.

The Lynx wasn’t that mysterious. It was presented as a bunch of loser-ish people in their 50s who drink a lot. How are you going to build storylines out of that?

I don’t know. But what I do know is that I love this character, and this setup was quirky enough to keep me invested. I don’t know how in the world to get to AMC’s streaming service, so I guess I’ll have to wait for it to hit Itunes.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: It’s so important these days to have multiple projects in multiple mediums. You need more than one egg in the basket. But more importantly, you need to be able to point to things THAT YOU’VE DONE. Gavin couldn’t will a TV show into existence. But he can get a book online. You’d be surprised at the way people look at you when you casually drop tidbits like, “I just finished a novel.” When you say stuff like that, people believe you’re serious about writing. And you never know who might spark to that book or other project. Who you could meet.

Genre: Action
Premise: The CIA must transfer an Indonesian cop to a remote airfield 22 miles away while avoiding the most dangerous man in the country, whose livelihood depends on killing everyone in their transport.
About: One of the biggest bromances in Hollywood – Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg – continues with Mile 22. This testosterone injection app was written by Graham Roland, who’s written on Lost, Prison Break, Fringe, and most recently created Amazon’s “Jack Ryan” series. Later on, newcomer Lea Carpenter would take on writing duties. But this is the original draft, before she got involved. The movie debuts a week from Friday and, in addition to Wahlberg, stars The Walking Dead’s Lauren Cohan, and Iko Uwais, who came to prominence in The Raid films.
Writer: Graham Roland
Details: 11/27/14 draft

I liked this script a lot.

And after finishing it, I wondered why I liked it so much more than the universally lauded Mission Impossible 6. They’re both testosterone-fueled realism-based action films with dudes and sometimes chicks shooting at each other. What’s the difference?

The difference is that Mission Impossible starts its brainstorming session by asking, “What cool action scenes can we create?” Once it has that figured out, they build a story around it.

Mile 22, meanwhile, was built around a concept. Trying to transport someone 22 miles to freedom, with everyone in the city trying to stop them. As a result, everything feels more organic. When an action scene in Mile 22 arrives, it arrives because it needs to arrive. It doesn’t arrive because the director really wanted that scene in the movie and had to move mountains to wedge it into the screenplay somehow.

And that’s all I’m asking for whenever I sit down to watch something – I want a good story. This is why, even though I’m not a big action guy, if you give me a good story with good characters, I’ll watch anything, even if it’s not in my wheelhouse.

This early version of Mile 22 focuses on Yuda, an Indonesian Police Lieutenant who unknowingly kills an important man during a drug raid after coming in on him ripping out the organs of a young woman. Yuda’s commander is furious, as it turns out he’s killed the nephew of the biggest crime boss in the city, Iblis Gurret.

The Indonesian police and Gurret’s gang come together to try and resolve this issue. And when Yuda realizes that they’re probably going to kill him, he flees. It doesn’t take long for Gurret’s guys to find him and kill his family. Yuda escapes once again, this time going to the only place he knows he’ll be safe, the U.S.’s CIA headquarters in the city.

Yuda offers the CIA a deal. He’ll give them information on some dead CIA agents if they’ll provide him with asylum. After they strike a deal, the CIA learns that Gurret, who’s some crazed black magic weirdo who cuts out the hearts of his victims, killed three of their agents. Now they have to hold up their end of the deal and fly Yuda back to the US. Unfortunately, the Indonesian Police control all the airports. So their only shot is driving Yuda to an abandoned airfield, 22 miles away, and having U.S. air support pick them up.

Leading the operation are Silva, a tough-as-nails can’t-shake-him agent, and Jett, who never wanted to be stationed in this country in the first place. As they gear up, they realize that their own network may have been compromised, and that because they now have information that could doom Gurret’s gang AND the police, that everyone in the city will be after them. Needless to say, it’s going to be one hell of a ride.

Man, this reads different from the trailer.

It looks like the first thing they changed was the black magic stuff. I found that a curious decision only because it was the most original stuff in the screenplay. But I can see guys like Wahlberg and Berg going in another direction. They’re fairly open about their love for realistic scenarios. Not to mention, we live in the most overly sensitive time in history. So if you make your Indonesian villain a black magic heart-eater, you might as well come up with the Twitter racism campaigns yourself.

They also changed the information that Yuda was carrying. The CIA killings were tied to the black magic, so after dropping the black magic plot, they had to change the “evidence” on the thumb drive as well. So now it’s information on “9 pounds of missing radioactive isotope.” That’s one of the drawbacks of eliminating unique plot points. Is the ancillary plot points become generic.

One of the funnier changes they made was reversing the importance of the two CIA agents. In this version, Jett, the female character, is the star. She’s the one with the complicated backstory and all the lines. Clearly, as soon as Mark Wahlberg came onto the project, he changed all that. You can see that he’s front and center with the decision-making in the trailer.

It also looks like they took out the slaughtering of Yuda’s family. This I can understand. If you just had your wife, kids, brother, nieces and nephews slaughtered in front of you, I don’t know if you’re gung-ho about going to the CIA and trying to escape the country. At that point, you’re essentially dead, right? Where are you getting your motivation? And it’s just a sad reality for the audience to endure. These movies are supposed to be fun. I’m not sure an audience is having fun after a family’s been turned into pulled pork.

But none of this matters because the heart of this concept is so strong. The idea of getting this dangerous person through the city with everyone who owns a gun trying to stop you is going to work regardless of how you move the pieces around. This is why everyone harps on the importance of concept. When you get the concept right, it does all the hard work for you.

Reading this, I can imagine how fun it would’ve been to write. When you have these setups, your goal as the writer is simple: THROW AS MUCH SHIT AT THE CHARACTERS AS POSSIBLE. So in their very first encounter with the gang, they get blown off the street. We’re a mile in and they’ve already lost their vehicle. Then they find out one of their own is broadcasting their location to the bad guys every few minutes. Then they learn that Gurrett just put a price on their head. Now EVERYONE in the city is after them. You keep making it worse and worse on your heroes and the joy comes in watching them try to emerge unscathed.

Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that NONE OF THIS WORKS unless you use your first act to make us fall in love with your characters. Roland did an amazing job setting up the characters of Yuda and Jett. I’d say each of them gets 5-8 pages of solid character development. Then, and only then, do we care when these characters are getting shot at later. When you don’t do this properly, your screenplay is empty action. And there’s nothing more boring than reading empty action.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Your first act is where you’ll do the bulk of your character work. This is where you set up the character’s flaw, their history, their relationships, and whatever else you want to throw in there that invokes an emotional connection to the character. Do this in the second act, after the reader has already determined that the character is boring, and it’s probably too late. Case in point: Silva. He’s introduced in a boring way. He doesn’t talk much. When he does talk, it’s nothing special. He doesn’t have any connections to anyone else we care about. Diagnosis: BORING. Later on, Silva reveals that his wife died of cancer. But by that point, it was too late. We’d already determined this character was weak-sauce.

I’m still trying to figure out how a McDonald’s Monopoly article became one of the hottest projects in town, seemingly overnight. As a screenwriter, it’s your job to take note of what A-list actors and directors are drawn towards so that you can use that knowledge in deciding what you yourself should write to attract similar talent. I don’t know why this one is garnering so much interest though. It seems dumb. What’s not dumb? Reading and voting on this weekend’s Amateur Offerings scripts!

For those playing for the first time, Amateur Offerings asks you to read as much as you can from each script and vote for your favorite in the comments section. The script with the most votes will receive a review next Friday!

And if you believe you have a screenplay that’s better than anything Hollywood is making at the moment, submit it for a future Amateur Offerings! Send me a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and why you think people should read it (your chance to pitch yourself or your story). All submissions should be sent to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com.

Title: THE LAST SHOT
Genre: Crime Drama/Action
Logline: When a routine prison transfer turns into a precarious hostage situation at a rural gas station & grill, a curmudgeonly small-town sheriff on the cusp of retirement must team up with a hardened Native American inmate to dodge gunfire and keep each other alive as a rebellious pack of insubordinates seek to finish off the ‘old guard.’ (Tonally, somewhat in the vein of ‘Hell or High Water’, ‘Wind River’, ‘Gran Torino’, or ‘No Country for Old Men’.)
Why You Should Read: Here’s what the Blacklist’s story analyst had to say about my script: “The story is rife with conflict and remains engaging from beginning to end, and the dialogue is really strong. The relatively contained setting also makes this a more affordable film to produce – especially considering the amount of action – which can open up wider range of potential financiers. And, the best crime dramas can absolutely draw large audiences; this is a very commercial film.”

I feel like it’s ‘almost there’; it’s been read by some reputable companies (like Screen Gems, Blumhouse, WWE Studios, etc.), and it’s helped me get some of my other scripts in a few reading piles on the strength of my writing voice, but thus far, no one’s pulled the trigger and said ‘Yes, I’d like to option this’.

It’s a little different (which can be refreshing in a genre like crime drama / action); it borrows more cues from movies like ‘The Breakfast Club’ than it does from movies like ‘Die Hard’. I want to keep the emphasis on the characters in a way that isn’t boring, in the sense that ‘The Breakfast Club’ isn’t primarily a movie about a bunch of kids trying to sneak out of detention (although they do, in fact, sneak out of the library at one point). Would love any and all feedback from the Scriptshadow universe. Thanks in advance for your consideration!

Title: The Final Frontier
Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi
Logline: On the last night before he permanently relocates to Mars, a disgraced astronaut struggles to settle his final affairs at home with his father, his kids, and his ex-wife.
Why You Should Read: I am an aspiring screenwriter and while I’ve gotten positive feedback from some other writers and from my friend who’s a development exec, I feel like I need some better notes on my material so that I can improve it enough to get repped. My script would technically fall under the Sci-Fi genre, but it is way more Richard Linklater than it is James Cameron. It is a family drama at its core, and ultimately depends on characters resonating with the audience and the dialogue being well-written in order for it to be successful. I’d like for you (and everyone who visits your site) to be the judge to decide whether I made it work. I urge you to give me a shot.

Title: Repossession
Genre: Comedy
Logline: When a mama’s boy buys an exotic car that’s haunted by a rich obnoxious party girl, the ghost won’t rest in peace while this stubborn five star loser owns her sweet ride.
Why You Should Read: My friends keep telling me I need to “live a little”. That I should get out more instead of staying in and writing scripts all the time. But instead of being more social and learning how to live a little, I decided to write a script about someone with the same problem lol. I thought it would be interesting to share this now because it’s basically the same concept as the recent AO contender, THE CAR, but my ghosts are played for laughs. What a coincidence! They say timing is everything. So, I decided to live a little and share my script with all the generous folks here on SS!

Title: Before I Forgot
Genre: Drama/Horror
Logline: The compelling true story of Dr Walter Freeman, a narcissistic egotist that convinced America his lobotomy procedure could cure everything from depression to the common cold. Thousands of returning soldiers and Rosemary Kennedy were amongst his ‘satisfied’ clients.
Why You Should Read: This little ‘slice’ of American history needs to be told to the masses. The more I researched this guy, the more I became entrenched by his audacity and the more I empathized with his victims, especially the American war heroes returning after WW2 with mental health issues. The mental health system in America was imploding. Dr Walter Freeman played God. Its a heavy subject matter. I wrote this script a while ago and feedback was that it would never get made into a movie in America, given the sensitivity of the Kennedy family and of course the fate of Rose Kennedy. Nothing like some controversy to propel a script. Thanks for your support and feedback. I hope I’ve done the story justice.

Title: Followers
Genre: Crime/Thriller
Logline: When a Philadelphia detective discovers her son belongs to a group of clowns terrorizing a suburban neighborhood, her attempts to protect him ignite a string a death and violence that threatens to swallow them, and the entire city, whole.
Why You Should Read: Followers is inspired by the pre-election clown hysteria of 2016. I decided to take that insanity and make it even more insane and tell it through a hyper-realistic crime thriller. Listen to Marilyn Manson’s “Mobscene” right before you read it and you’ll get an idea of the tone of this thing. Enjoy, I hope.

One of the worst things that can happen in screenwriting is to write a script and then, 45 pages in, 60 pages in, 75 pages in… you run out of ideas. You don’t know where the story should go. You stare at the screen, you rack your brain, but no matter how hard you try, you don’t see any way to complete the story. Maybe, you say to yourself, the idea was never good enough to begin with. Maybe there was nothing here from the start. And while that may be true, running out of ideas during a screenplay is a common problem. Sometimes the brain just stops working. The good news is, there are ways to combat this.

First of all, the biggest reason we run out of steam during a screenplay is because we didn’t outline. Outlining helps us see if the story has legs. If you’re not a fan of the outline, that’s fine. But I would still implore you to write down four major checkpoints in your script before you start writing it. What happens at the end of the first act (the launching point). What happens at the midpoint (a twist or major event that shakes your story up). What happens at the end of the second act (the lowest point). And your ending.

If you have these figured out beforehand, you’ll always have something visible to write towards. A big reason we run out of ideas is because the void in front of us is too big, too uncertain. We see 60-70 pages ahead of us and there aren’t enough ideas in the world to fill that up. But if our next pre-determined checkpoint is never more than 30 pages away, that feels more manageable. We can come up with enough ideas to get to that point.

But let’s say you’ve outlined your script only to find that, midway through the writing process, your outline was wrong. Or maybe you had a better idea that spun the story in a different direction, and now your outline is worthless. This happens all the time. Storytelling is malleable. You get new ideas. You follow new paths. You find yourself in unexpected territory constantly. So even if you had the best intentions and did things “right,” you can still find yourself halfway in with nowhere to go.

My experience has been that everything comes back to the active character. An active character is someone who is always trying to achieve something at every moment of the movie. The characters in Jumanji are always trying to get out of the game. In Blockers, the kids are all trying to get laid. The adults are all trying to stop the kids. The Equalizer always has a bad guy to take down. The Game Night couples are all trying to solve the murder-mystery first. The mom and the son are trying to escape their captivity in Room. As long as your character is active, they’ll always have something they’re trying to do, which means you’ll always have somewhere to take the story. Conversely, if you build your movie around a passive, reactive, or occasionally active character, it becomes infinitely harder to come up with ways to keep the story moving. Because instead of your hero racing towards something, you’re trying to come with outside factors that give your hero something to do. And that’s a lot harder.

Tully is an example of a script that’s easy to run out of ideas during. The main character is mostly sitting around the house the whole movie. Or a script like Call Me By Your Name. You’ve got two characters hanging around in a town passing time. Now both of these movies were reviewed well, so I’m not saying this is a death sentence. I’m only saying that when you build stories around inactive characters, you will definitely run into more walls during the writing process, especially if you didn’t outline beforehand.

Now that you know this, use it to your advantage. Have your main character be more active. An active character is a goal-driven character. They typically have an overall goal they’re trying to achieve (the goal of the movie) and then a series of goals they need to achieve to accomplish the major goal. So whenever you’re stuck, you simply give your character another “mini-goal” that they have to achieve. This mini-goal could set up your next scene, your next couple of scenes, or an entire 15 minute sequence. For example, in Deadpool 2, the goal is to get the kid. So technically, you could have Deadpool run off and get the kid and be done with it. Instead, they make getting the kid impossible. So Deadpool needs a team. This leads to a new goal – put a team together. This adds 10 pages to your story. As long as you have an overarching goal for your hero to achieve, an active character will always have smaller goals he needs to achieve in the meantime.

Another method for extending the story is to keep throwing disruptions at your hero, leading to their failure, which forces them to try again. There was a famous article over at Wordplayer about how Raiders of the Lost Ark was one giant series of Indiana Jones failures. But it works because Indy gets back up and tries again. He’s active. He keeps going after the goal. In my favorite film from last year, Good Time, the goal is to get the brother out of jail. Out hero’s first goal is to try and get money for bail. But before he can get it, his brother is beat up and transferred to a hospital. New goal. Break him out of the hospital. Our hero successfully breaks him out, only to find out that he took the wrong patient (his brother was wearing a face cast). So now he’s got to save his brother again. If there aren’t a series of goals already in place to get your hero to the climax, keep throwing obstacles at them that force them to try again.

But let’s say you’ve tried all that and you’re still coming up with nothing. What do you do? Do you give up? Do you put the script away for awhile? When it comes to nuts-and-bolts sitting down to write, this is where the rubber meets the road. It often comes down to how dedicated you are to this script and to writing in general. Because if you’re only half-in, you’re not going to fight when the chips are down. And the chips are down a lot in writing. You’re always battling against a lack of ideas, a lack of creativity. And it takes a steel backbone to muscle through these moments. This is why I always tell writers, make sure you’re PASSIONATE about any script you choose to write. Because, sure, it’s easy to be excited at the beginning. But do you love this idea enough to fight for it on Draft 5 one year from now?

Here are a few things you can do. You can use the vomit approach. That means erase all judgement and, no matter what, keep writing. Coming up with something to write isn’t difficult. Coming up with something GOOD to write is. But if you only write when you have good ideas, you’re going to be spending a lot of time staring at your screen and getting frustrated. So muscling through those shitty “no ideas” moments is one approach. And the good news is that you’re way more likely to come across a great idea if you’re writing than if you’re sitting and trying to come up with it out of thin air.

Another thing you can do is write two projects at the same time. Whenever you’re struggling with one project, you simply switch over to the other one. It’s best if these projects are as different as possible. A horror and a comedy. A feature and a pilot. We spend so much time inside our scripts that we begin to hate everything about them. To be able to jump to a completely different universe with a different set of rules is just the thing the mind needs to stay engaged and creative. I think I read a Jordan Peele interview where he touts this writing approach.

Another method I found useful is to take your phone out, set the timer for 30 minutes, and just write for the full 30 minutes. You don’t have to write ANYTHING after those 30 minutes. Just 30 minutes each day and you’re done. What you’ll find is that a freedom emerges where you don’t feel the pressure to write the perfect screenplay, but rather you’re just accomplishing a task. My experience has been that if you do this for a week or two, you’ll be back on track, with a full set of ideas to get your script finished.

To summarize, the main reason we run out of ideas during a script is because we didn’t plan ahead of time. Outlining is a screenwriter’s best friend. The next biggest problem is an inactive main character. It’s hard to push the story forward when your hero doesn’t have an objective. So write inactive heroes at your own risk. And finally, if you’ve done everything right and you’re still stuck, blunt force may be the only option. This is not a fun way to write, but it’s important to remember that writing isn’t always fun. It’s often work. So get to work, push through those tough moments, and hopefully there’s some fun on the other side.