Lost

The Third Quarter Drop-Dead

So at some point in this book or script of yours, maybe right about now, you’re going to start feeling like this:

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Or this.

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Or this:

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You are very likely - almost certainly - okay, guaranteed—to reach a point that you just don’t know what to do next and you really couldn’t care less, because you hate this so-called book beyond comprehension and would give anything to never have started.

I had an executive friend in movie development who called it “The Third-Quarter Drop Dead.”

But here’s the thing. Writing a book, and most especially Act II: part 2, the third quarter, is supposed to be like that. You have to get lost because your character is lost. You, the author, have to believe you will never find a way out of it, that there is literally no hope, to be able to write the despair of it and take your reader or audience down to that black hole along with your character.