The three act structure has been with us for thousands of years, used by storytellers around cave fires long before Aristotle named it and wrote it down. Beginning, middle and end is hard-coded into how human beings tell stories. Which is why I was flabbergasted to find out recently that some of my writer friends never think about how this fundamental underpinning applies to their novels. A big part of this, I’m told, is that they consider the three act structure to be a screenplay thing that doesn’t work with longer form fiction.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Let’s go over the fundamentals and then I’ll tell you how you can use this to make your novels impossible to put down.

Act One: The Beginning

The first act introduces things. It introduces your protagonist, their world, and the change right there on page on that disrupts the protagonist’s status quo. In this act, your protagonist struggles to get on top of things and reacts to the disruption. You’re building slowly but steadily to the first act break, where your protagonist asserts control and takes the initiative, changing the direction of the plot into…

Act Two: The Complications

In this act, your protagonist struggles to overcome the story’s central problem. You’ll throw lots of twists, turns and obstacles at your protagonist, forcing them to continue the struggle. This is often done as a series of try/fail cycles, where the protagonist tries something, figures out why that didn’t work and then uses that to try something new. Mysteries, with all their clues and red herrings, are great examples of try/fail cycles. Act two should be the majority of your book, building to…

Act Three: The Climax

In act three, the protagonist finally succeeds in addressing the story’s main problem. The conflict with the antagonist gets resolved, and then we deal with the aftermath. By the end of your story, you should have established a new equilibrium that puts the protagonist back into a stable state they haven’t seen since the events that began act one. This doesn’t have to be the exact same conditions, and in fact shouldn’t be unless you’re doing episodic fiction where the status quo must be restored.

Turning Points

If you look closely at just about any story, you’ll see they follow the above structure, at least roughly. It’s how we’re wired. But one of te things that separates the average stories from the really good ones is that the good ones make the structure work for them. And the easiest way to do that is by making sure the turning points at your act breaks are as dramatic as possible.

There should be significant changes for the protagonist at the end of act one and act two, major events that completely change the world for that character. Sometimes the turning point at the first act break is so momentous that the protagonist spends all of act two just trying to get back to how things were (The Odyssey and countless others). Push these act breaks for all you can to keep the story dynamic.

Ratios

Traditionally, acts were often 30/40/30% of the total word count. Tolkien and other 19th and early 20th century writers stuck pretty close to this, with a long lead up to the complication and a long wind down after the climax. Over the last 30-50 years, however, both acts one and three have been getting shorter and shorter. Peter Jackson made pehaps his most severe cuts to Tolkiens Lord of the Rings in act three, after the ring had been destroyed, and he was still widely criticized for “dragging it out”.

Your act ratios will vary according to the work. Heavy action works, the sorts of stories that grow up to be Michael Bay movies, will likely be closer to 10/80/10%. But be careful with this. Readers are impatient, true, but without a properly developed act one, they wont care about your characters once you get into the weeds of act two. And act three is just as important. I’ve seen a study postulating that we see so many car chases now because the act three of those stories are rarely televised. People don’t see the arrest, booking and trial, so they start to forget that actions have consequences. Act three is not just the climax but also the consequences, why the story matters. Don’t forget that in your rush to get it over with.

Other Act Structures

Other structures are really three acts in disguise. The four act structure is puts an extra turning point in the middle of act two, often referred to as the midpoint, as it’s likely to be halfway through the book if your ratios are balanced. The Shakespearean five act structure merely breaks act two, which again should be larger than your other acts, into its own smaller three act structure like a fractal. In fact, this kind of recursive, fractal math shows up at larger scales as well. Why do you think trilogies are so popular? Because they resonate with our innate understanding of stories as three part things.

But don’t take my word for it. Do your own research. Look into how a mastery of story structure can help you take your stories to the next level.

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