Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the smartest of them all? You are. That’s why you’re writing the script – I hope – because you believe in its potential excellence. And in the beginning, this confidence is easy. You have enough passion and excitement to fill the National Mall as you speak from your pulpit at The Lincoln Memorial to rally your inner troops. The problem occurs months later. You battled in the trenches doing story and character research, outlining the screenplay, and now you’re stuck somewhere in the second act. It’s all just a big nightmare mess. Your…

Dramatic effect derives from what is probable, and not from what is possible. - Aristotle The course of events the screenwriter sets in motion has not only followed the plausible path; the audience comes to believe there could not possibly have been any other outcome. This feeling of inevitability - a combination of characters moving along a course from which there is no possible turning - is perhaps a screenwriter’s finest achievement. Inevitability is the sense, as the events unfold, that they couldn’t have happened another way, while predictability relates to the…