I had gotten through the first act of my Western. All the characters had been introduced, the conflicts had been presented, I’d made reference to a big event set to occur later in the story, and my main character Barclay was now neck deep in a predicament he would have to deal with for the rest of the screenplay.
And I felt…alright about it.
I felt that the scenes and sequences were solid. Each character felt like they had their own goals they were striving towards, all of which felt organic to the story. But I still had my concerns about the pace.
While I felt there was always something going on in the scenes, that they were more than just exposition dumps, these pages were starting to add up. I think. I was still writing them on only on the left hand side of the page in a notebook, with my notes on each action and dialogue written on the right side of the page. This was starting to rack up a lot of individual pages in the notebook, with sequences averaging about fifteen pages written in this manner, with the longest sequence being over 30.
Thirty pages for one sequence in a screenplay would definitely be too long, essentially a third of the movie. However, I wasn’t using a screenplay format when I was writing out scenes in my notebook. I had to keep telling myself that things were still fine, that when I transferred these scenes into some screenwriting software, the actual pages converted to proper formatting for a screenplay would bring the page numbers down a lot.
For all I knew, the first act may have gone a tad long, but was still properly paced.
I also had to remind myself that this was all a first draft. Perfection wasn’t necessary at this stage. All that mattered was getting some version of the full story onto the page. There would still be plenty of rounds of editing to come.
Even with those reminders, I couldn’t help but think about all of the other pivotal moments in the screenplay that were still to come, and writing the scenes necessary to set up those moments. I’d gotten one act down on the page, but I saw myself facing the same scenario for the other two thirds of my script.