Act III Blues

Act III: the denouement. Where everything gets wrapped up. Your Act III is supposed to pay off everything's that come before. Len likes to say that Act III should write itself--perhaps this is why so many Third Acts suck in movies these days: because they only write themselves when handled by a good writer.

Yesterday I went over to Linda's house and we discussed problems she had and then problems I had. I told her the sequence of events that I wanted to happen in Act III, and she thought it all sounded fine--then she helped me work out some of the mechanics.

I went home and wrote it. 12 pages in, I realized the Act as I had it set up rested on a major coincidence (all the major players showing up at the same place at roughly the same time) and tossed 12 pages. At 9pm, I started writing again and got about 10 pages in. I realized that this scenario was ludicrous, although in a different way.

I haven't tossed those pages yet. In fact, I'm not going to do anything more until I work out the sequence of who's doing what to whom precisely. Thank God I write quickly, or else I'd be depressed and wouldn't even have the pages to show for what doesn't work.

Or maybe I'll just work on my other script until thesis class on Thursday. I wanted to finish my thesis script this week, but as of right now it looks as though I'll be on page 105 forever.

After I get done with a draft, however, the fun part starts: two members of my thesis committee mentioned that 115 was the page count to aim for. I know that I will end on page 125 (or thereabouts...like 130), and then I have to start trimming--or outright chopping.

Sunday morning Rob G., the guy who teaches the new section of the rewrite class, called me with notes on my first script, the one I'm going to rewrite when I can find two and a half seconds to think about it. He liked a lot of it and thought some of it was pretty dopey. (Some of it--like the Act III--is pretty dopey.)

I told him this week I turn in my new sequence structure and bios of all the character, because once again I have to figure out who was doing what to whom over the past 30 or 40 years--there's a lot of backstory in this script.

It's tough to switch between the two scripts, though. There are some people who write one in the morning and the other in the evening. I think: how do they stop? How do they switch over their internal universes that easily? Maybe that's a skill that can be learned.

Kind of like learning to write an Act III, I guess.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Did about 45 minutes on the bike at the gym on Sunday. I got horribly nauseous Sunday night and I took a nap. When I woke up an hour later, I was on my back, my arms pressed up against my sides so tightly that they physically hurt me, and my muscles were clenched so hard that I had trouble moving in order to get out of bed.

I decided to take yesterday off.

Today: I'll be going into the gym to do weights.