It’s interesting that the two screenplays you’ve finished were for classes. Maybe what you need is a deadline. Before I was a screenwriter with dozens of unproduced screenplays I was a playwright with dozens of unproduced plays, plays that no one wanted to read but which I had to write anyway. Since I knew no one was interested in reading them, I had to create my own deadline or else I would never finish them. So I would set a completely arbitrary deadline, say, six weeks, from beginning to end, and I would write toward that deadline, and I would stick to it.

But maybe deadline is not your problem. If your screenplay gets tied up in insoluble knots at the top of Act III, it may be because you didn’t plot it out well enough ahead of time. This is where treatments come in handy. They take a lot less time to write and they reduce the stress of writing the actual screenplay. If you’ve plotted the whole thing out ahead of time, the screenplay should be a simple filling in of the blanks.

I see that you have “about 100 different little ideas for themes, or characters or scenes.” What about story? David Lynch once said that writing a screenplay is easy, you just jot down ideas for scenes on notecards, and when you have 70 of those, you’ve got a feature. Well, David Lynch is one of the most imaginative, creative artists of our time but in this regard he is full of shit. You need a solid story before you start writing your screenplay, otherwise you are wasting your time, your screenplay will become a tangled mess by the end of Act II, justwhen it should be turning into an unstoppable dramatic juggernaut.

In fact, maybe it’s the second-act break that you’re getting stuck on. By the end Act II, the entire “problem” of the screenplay should be in complete focus and honed to its irreducible point. By the end of Act II, the protagonist should know who he is, what’s going on and where he needs to go to get to the ending, and then Act III should be how he gets there (whether he arrives at his goal or not is a different matter). At the end of Act II, Dr. Kimble has identified the one-armed man. At the end of Act II, the killer Brad Pitt’s been chasing suddenly turns himself in to the police. At the end of Act II, Clarice has her final confrontation with Lecter and he gives her the clue she needs to solve the case. If you’re arriving at the end of Act II and your script is suddenly falling apart, you may be structuring your acts wrong.

If you know how your second act ends but you don’t know what happens afterward, think of what you want the ending to be and write that. I do this all the time; there will be big spot in the script where I don’t know what’s supposed to happen, and instead of giving up I just type a row of X’s and skip to the next place where I know what’s supposed to happen. Or else write what we in Hollywood call “the bad version,” just the dumbest, most cliched version of events you can think of. Then at least you’ve got something written down and you can finish the thing and then go back, read it as a complete thing instead of a broken idea, and set about fixing it.

One thing I know: all writing is re-writing. If you don’t like re-writing you should not write screenplays. Early on in my career I had the good fortune to have a conversation with Scott Frank.  I had just finished working on Curtain Call and he had just finished working on, I believe, Saving Private Ryan (I know, I know, he didn’t get a credit — this is the life we’ve chosen).  I was carping about how often the producer of Curtain Call had made me endlessly re-write scenes and all I wanted was to have the damn thing done, and Scott said “Gee, that’s weird, I have the exact opposite problem, my scripts are always going into production before I feel like I’m done with them, I’ll see the movie in the theater and think ‘Man, if they had only given me one more day with that scene, I could’ve really made it sing.'”  And he’s right — you have to enjoy the whole process and look forward to working on the script more.

Hope this helps.

I’m sure there are screenwriters who think of an idea, write it up, sell the script and then think up another idea. I am not one of those screenwriters. In my world, there are producers who develop properties that they hope to sell to a studio. The producer calls me up, tells me about the property he has, and if it sounds good to me I’ll try to think of a way to do it as a movie. If I can, I will then go and audition for the producer. If the producer likes what I have to say, we will both go and audition for the studio folk (and by “we” I mean “me;” the producer’s job at the audition is to introduce the writer and then watch him sweat).

When an actor (Urbaniak, say) auditions for a movie, he must memorize a few pages of dialogue and go into the room with a clear idea of the character he’s portraying. When I audition for a movie, I must, essentially, write the entire thing before I go into the room. I must know who all the major characters are and have a handful of character beats that establish their personalities in a warm, human way, I must have a clear idea of not just the over-arching story but also the ins and outs of the scene-to-scene plot. I must invent every twist, reversal and revelation to give the thing thrust and excitement. I must, basically, see the entire movie in my head from beginning to end and I must be able to describe it, in the room, in a lively, entertaining, surprising way that meshes with that studios hopes for their production slate. Then, if I don’t get the job, I start the process all over with the next project the next day.

(Q: “why don’t you get the job?”  A: For a lot of the same reasons an actor doesn’t — I’m just not what the studio is looking for.  The problem is, often, that the studio doesn’t know what it’s looking for, and uses this audition process, in part, to hone its notion of what kind of movie it wants to make.)

I have been a professional screenwriter since 1994. In the ensuing years, I have written 25 or so screenplays. Of those, I’ve been paid actual money (and very good money at that, I hasten to add) for perhaps a dozen (the rest have been things I wrote for myself or for friends). For each of “actual job” or “money gig” (that is, a feature at a major studio), I create, typically, eight drafts, for which I get paid for four (courtesy dictates that one writes a draftfor the producer, incorporates the producer’s notes, then writes another for the studio).

So that’s all well and good. But then there are the treatments.

I cannot speak for other writers, but if I’m going to invent an entire movie I have to write at least a portion of it down on paper (by “paper” I mean, of course, a computer). For the plot to play out in a logical, consistent order I have to write it all out so I can go back, review,
amend, improve, edit, remove, etc. Basically, I write out the whole plot of the movie with notes regarding why this or that is important to the telling.

(The Writer’s Guild says that writers must be paid for treatments, but I have found that this is rare. What generally ends up happening is that I go in and pitch and the producer says “I like it, I’d like to think about it more, do you have something on paper I could look at to refresh my memory?” and the onus is placed on me to to be helpful for the good of the project. Personally, I don’t mind this practice because I think that my written words are a better presentation of my ideas than my fumbling, scattered pitch manner.)

I had a meeting with an old producer friend the other day and she asked me what old ideas I had kicking around. She specifically asked me to trawl through my treatments I’ve written for other projects, jobs I didn’t get, knowing that there are most likely some good ideas for movies in there. So I went through my files and found that I have, in the past dozen years, written 83 treatments. These treatments range from 10-page collections of notes and plot ideas to 50-page scene-by-scene descriptions. In some cases, I have written multiple treatments for projects, bringing the number well past 100.  Creating these treatments is, in fact, how I spend the bulk of my writing life.

Of all these treatments, I have been paid for writing two; the rest have been created for the purposes of auditions.

So, to review: 12 years, 100+ treatments to get jobs writing 25 screenplays, of which I have been paid for 12, of which three have been turned into actual feature films (although there are perhaps a half-dozen others I’ve worked without receiving credit), of which one was an actual hit in-the-theaters movie (without which I’d probably be working at your local Denny’s).