I think every writer's heard the Nabokov quote, "The writer's main job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them."

It's brilliant in its simplicity and Abbott did a nice job adapting it for the three acts of a film.

But -- I've read a ton of amateur scripts over the years. From mid-2021 until the end of 2023, I read at least one a month from a random writer for notes.

Throughout those, the most frequent issue I saw was a passive protagonist.

In some of these scripts, the first ten pages rule.

For what it’s worth, I’m the worst person to follow if you want to know how to do this kind of thing quickly. But if you’ve been at it a while and are wondering if it’s worth it…

1/4 Wrote my first script in 2004.

Wrote this script in 2012. It got me my first manager.

Optioned in in 2012. To a big producer. It fell apart a year later.

Had a couple years of almosts after breaking in and then finally quit all together.

2/4

Was recently struggling to address some notes, so I re-read the script a couple times and realized the issue was that the producers weren't able to connect with key parts of my protagonist's journey.

So I did something I've never done before and created an EMOTIONAL OUTLINE. 🧵 Basically, I went through the script beat by beat and created a bullet-pointed list of my protagonist's emotions -- both her emotional state at the beginning of each scene and how it was impacted by the events of the scene.

Kinda amazed that with weed now being legal, there isn't yet a screenwriting contest where that's the entire prize.

I'm gonna make a couple million on this next year. Watch.

But first -- what do we call it? (This is what happens when you spend too much time talking to @JasonGruich and @NickGambino1)