When I was in high school and college, I firmly believed that I would be a Hollywood screenwriter. I read Syd Field and Robert McKee. I wrote a couple of screenplays (one logline: When the coaches of a terrible high school football team quit, the academic faculty must band together to save the season). I owned Final Draft. The trick with screenwriting is that you have to actually go to L.A. and give yourself 5-10 years, and instead I met a Girl and settled down.
In my freetime I've switched to writing novels, the ultimate remote work, and I've lost a lot of the "52 index card" discipline that I originally had. Over the past decade, first draft prep for me has become a little haphazard. I usually start with a 2k word synopsis (which includes a lot of, "something happens here, not quite sure what yet") and a few character summaries to remind myself what everybody's motivation is (as well as the color of their hair). That works most of the time.
A couple of months ago I started my first "first draft" in two years and found I'm a little rusty. I had a really clear vision for the first 50 pages, for the characters arcs and the ultimate message. Other than that, I was crossing my fingers that it would come to me as I wrote. After completing those first 50 pages...it hadn't. So I've gone back to screenwriting.
Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT is not nearly as academic as Field or McKee, but it is just as useful. As I read through this book in the last week, a couple of things stood out to me, including that all the "movie trailer moments" will occur in the first half of the second act, that the midpoint of the book should be a false victory (or defeat) where the stakes are raised, and that the beat right before the third act should be the emotionally darkest for the main character. I also liked how he envisioned those three acts: the first grounded in the character's normal life, the second in an "upside down" version (where the plot has forced the main character out of her comfort zone), and the third in a "synthesized' version (where, having changed, the main character takes the best parts of their normal and upside down experiences and synthesizes those for a stronger version of themselves).
Forcing myself to write an outline railroaded to the common beats of a movie showed me that I didn't have clear villain to continually raise the stakes. It also helped me understand where some emotional developments that I envisioned had to take place (instead of, "at some point they begin to like each other"). I still don't look forward to writing the next 300 pages, no one does, but at least now I don't dread the paralyzing blankness of translating "something happens here" into action. 10/10, would SAVE THE CAT again.
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