Week 10 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge
Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Every Thursday, for the first six months of 2024, Scriptshadow is throwing you on his sleigh and flying you around Planet Screenplay. Planet Screenplay is a world that, at times, contains love, beauty and wonder. Other times, it is a world of fear, frustration, and uncertainty.
But don’t worry. I got ya! I will make sure you get through every single country of your script with all your limbs intact. Not promising you won’t lose your head. But limbs I’m pretty sure I’ve got.
That’s because I’m offering the easiest way to write a screenplay in the books. All you have to do is write 2 pages a day and you get 2 extra days at the end of the week to catch up if, for whatever reason, Captain Writer’s Block makes a visit to your brain condo.
The greatest thing about all this is that when it’s over, WE HAVE A COMPETITION. The biggest Showdown in Scriptshadow history will take place: Mega Showdown (Imagine those giant echoing voices they used to use for those monster truck commercials: “Megaaa-ahhh-ahhh-ahhh Showdown-down-down-down!” It’s going to be stupendous.
But first, we have to get through one of the toughest parts of the screenplay: THE MIDPOINT.
A lot of that initial excitement you had when you first came up with your idea and wrote those first few scenes of your script? Yeah, that’s long gone. Reality has set in. And with it, its mistress: frustration.
You’re starting to question certain plot points, certain characters. And, if you’re a real writer, you’re starting to question if you should give up screenwriting altogether. The “Give-Up” Dragon becomes a constant companion on this journey. And he breathes failure-fire, that bastard.
One thing that helped me learn to finish screenplays (as opposed to abandon them) is to stop thinking of screenwriting as something that has to be fun all the time. If you’re a screenwriter, screenwriting IS YOUR JOB.
For your regular 9 to 5 job, are you allowed to stop showing up? No. You have to go. Even when you feel like crap. Even when there are seven fires you’ll have to put out that day. Even when Annoying Bill is going to ask you to play racketball with him for the sixth time this month. Even when you just plain don’t want to go. You still go.
Which is how you need to approach screenwriting. The real screenwriters are not the ones who can write when everything’s going well. They’re the ones who keep writing even when things are going badly.
A big part of the reason things go badly is judgment. Your brain is constantly judging your writing. Even as you’re writing stuff down, you’re thinking, “This doesn’t work. This is stupid. I don’t like this.” So you stop.
You can’t do that. The first draft will always be the messiest draft. It will be your worst draft. AND THAT’S OKAY. Cause the goal of the first draft is not to write something great. It’s to get it done.
I went on a sneaky little family vacation to Cancun a couple of weeks ago and my brother and I got in a long discussion about writing. He’s not a writer but he’s interested in what I do. He said, “All I know is that, in college, when I had to write a paper, rewriting it was going to be easy. So I knew that all I had to do was get a first draft done as fast as I could. No matter how bad it was, from that point on, it was easy.”
That’s great advice for screenwriters as well. Get it down on paper so you can start rewriting it. Cause rewriting is easier than conjuring stuff up out of thin air.
Now onto more specific advice. We have arrived at your script’s MIDPOINT.
The midpoint is a critical checkpoint in your screenplay because the audience needs to feel some sort of SHIFT in the story in order to stay interested. This shift, when done well, works like a rogue wave in the ocean. There’s our screenplay, floating along, and then this giant wave picks it up and pushes it all the way to shore (our ending).
There are multiple ways to approach the midpoint. Some writers like to insert a surprising twist. Some writers like to up the stakes. Some writers like to kill a character off. Some writers like to introduce a new character. There’s one common denominator here and that’s that something bigger needs to happen.
In the original Top Gun, the midpoint has Maverick lose his wing man and best friend, Goose.
In the midpoint of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the four characters who are stuck in the game run into Alex, a mysterious character who has been stuck in the game for years. He then sets them on the proper path in order to get home.
In everybody’s favorite punching bag of a movie (but one I like), The Force Awakens, the midpoint is the demonstration of Starkiller Base, which uses its power to destroy dozens of planets at once. The stakes have been raised. We now know why it’s so important to defeat the First Order.
In Zombieland, the midpoint’s effect is a little more complex. It has our crew arriving at their destination, California. This doesn’t necessarily up the stakes. There’s no big twist. But since the first half of the movie was a road-trip, the arrival in California changes the make-up of the movie considerably. The conflict will now be contained to one area. That’s important: You don’t want the second half of your movie to feel exactly like the first half or we’ll get bored.
The midpoint of Equalizer 3, which has our hero Robert McCall hiding out in an Italian town, has him move from avoiding detection and staying undercover, to actively going after the evil crime syndicate there.
Steven Spielberg, the king of the action set-piece, uses his midpoint in Jurassic Park to mark the arrival of the T-Rex, which attacks our poor protagonists who are helplessly stuck in their jeep. It’s not so much a plot development as it is an antagonist arrival. The stakes have been raised considerably now that we know what we’re up against.
In the almost brilliant “Leave the World Behind” (Netflix), which follows two families stuck in a remote house as World War 3 begins, the midpoint has that amazing remote-Tesla driving attack scene, where Tesla cars shoot at our driving heroes at 130 miles per hour, crashing into each other at the highway entrance, gumming up the highways so that people can’t escape. Like the T-Rex scene, this scene upped the stakes and let us know just how dangerous this threat is.
In one of my favorite comedies ever, Dumb and Dumber, our two favorite morons break-up! Lloyd accidentally drives 600 miles in the wrong direction and it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back for Harry. He’s out. He leaves (and starts walking home!).
A Quiet Place has one of the better midpoints in recent memory. It’s the moment when Emily Blunt’s character’s water breaks and she has to have her baby in silence, alone. Not only is it the best scene in the movie, but it ups the stakes considerably. Now there’s a baby involved for the second half of the movie. And babies like to make noise.
That’s something I only noticed by doing this research. For some of these movies, the midpoint includes the best scene (or one of the best scenes). So, if you don’t know how to raise the stakes or how to change the fortunes of your second half so that it doesn’t feel like the first half, or you don’t want to introduce a new character or kill one off, one thing you know you can do reliably is write a great set piece scene. That alone can JOLT a reader back to attention.
So there you have it. I’m excited that we’re crossing the halfway point of our scripts this week. We’re going to be finished with this thing in no time.
See you next week!
