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You have your Instigating Event or Inciting Incident (whatever you want to call it) and your Major Dramatic Question is introduced and you're moving along nicely to the end of Act One. You're feeling good and confident and secretly thinking you'll finish this one in two weeks.
Then you're into Act Two and stuck. Here's something to ease the pain.
Make sure that dramatic complications arise from the situation you have set up in Act One.
Sounds pretty simple and basic, but this is where most screenwriters go off track. Simply, they haven't come up with enough complications and obstacles to get in the way of your protagonist. Or the ones they did come up with weren't very difficult.
Look at it like this: make life miserable for your main character. We need to feel sorry for him/her in order for us to root for him/her. Since I'm tired of saying him/her I'll just say him. Make everything in his path not go his way. He has to actively get past each obstacle. Some can be easy, but the further into the script they should be more difficult, with the most difficult coming near the end.
Pretty simple, right? But very hard to do.
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