2020 Zero Draft Thirty March Challenge: Day 23

Scott Myers
Go Into The Story
Published in
4 min readMar 23, 2020

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One month. FADE IN to FADE OUT. Creativity meets Productivity.

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 23.

Write an entire draft of a script in March — FADE IN. FADE OUT. Or any sort of creative goal you have in front of you.

Feature length movie screenplay. Original TV pilot. Rewrite a current project. Break a story in prep. Generate a month’s worth of story concepts.

Whatever you feel will ratchet your creative ambitions into overdrive…

DO THAT!

DOWNLOAD LINK

On Twitter, use this hashtag: #ZD30SCRIPT.

Zero Draft Thirty Facebook Group: Here. 3,800+ members strong.

Today’s Writing Quote

“Every day I get up and put myself in a frame of mind for inspiration to come.”

— Tim Blake Nelson

Today’s Inspirational Poem

Aristotle

By Billy Collins

This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage
as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her,
your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes —
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward’s child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle —
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall —
too much to name, too much to think about.

And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair,
and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

Beginning. Middle. End. Three Act Structure. It’s innate to Story. Hopefully, as you continue to write your script in the Zero Draft Thirty Challenge, you’ve got Act III in your sites.

Today’s Loos Award winner: Trish Curtin!

Trish is one of the Zero Draft Thirty Facebook group administrators, but much more than that. I’ve known Trish for several years now and she was a major contributor to the 12 Free Go Into The Story eBooks series, editing at least half of them. Beyond that, she is a talented writer and delightful person. Indeed, it was she along with a few others who came up with the Zoom Room concept for this year’s March Challenge.

For all she does and is, the recipient of today’s Anita Loos Award is Trish Curtin!

Want an Anita Loos Award? Upload an inspirational thought or photo here, on Twitter, or the Facebook group. Aspire to inspire! The spirit of the Award!

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 1

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 2

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 3

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 4

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 5

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 6

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 7

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 8

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 9

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 10

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 11

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 12

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 13

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 14

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 15

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 16

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 17

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 18

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 19

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 20

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 21

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 21

Zero Draft Thirty: Day 22

Onward!

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