A writer’s despair: getting past Act II

These last few days have felt for me like the Act II climax in Joseph Campbell’s archetype of a hero’s journey, which he called a monomyth: evil is closing in, and soon all will be lost.

That’s about where I am on my current project, a screenplay I’m writing on spec as a sample for my agent to shop around. And it’s just about exactly how I feel.

If you’re a writer, you’re familiar: it’s that midpoint in a project when you realize it sucks, and you suck, and the world sucks, and it would be criminal to inflict your stink bomb on a world already bereft of non-odiferous entertainment, and really what you ought to do is go hang yourself.

That’s where I am. So forgive my inability to comment as usual on Balloon Boy (“guilty”? I’ll say — of stupidity) or Lou Dobbs (good riddance) or the last episode of “Glee” (waiting on the DVR while I concentrate on sucking).

Here’s Christopher Vogler applying Campbell’s structure of myth to the movie “Matrix”: