What is 3-act structure? It's simply a shorthand for industry professionals to have a conversion about the structure of a story. Specifically, Hollywood is use to breaking stories into three acts as follows:
Act One: The first 25% of your story.
Act Two: The next 50% of your story.
Act Three: The final 25% of your story.
What’s a second-act sag? It’s when everything bogs down at the halfway point of your story. What's a slow first-act? It's when your story takes too much time to get going. What's a disappointing third act? It's when the end of your movie fails to live up to the expectations set in the first and second acts. This is the language of story, an easy way of breaking story down—especially when dealing with people in the industry whose livelihood depends on movies but who don't actually write stories.
As a writer, it's helpful to identify clear first, second, and third acts for any story you're developing. Just because the industry standard is a first and third act that takes up 25-30 pages and a second act that's 50-60 pages doesn't mean you're forced to drag a story's beginning out that long. If you can get into the second act quicker, then do so. If you don't know why you should worry about getting into your second act sooner yet, hang on.
The three-act structure exists because all stories have three parts: A beginning, a middle, and an end. The basic three-act structure is literally a way of translating this common-sense structure of beginning, middle, and end into a format that can be discussed, dissected, and used for story analysis.
Why is there so much vitriol directed against three-act structure among writers and writing instructors?
In this illiterate writer's humble opinion, it's because the three-act structure is an insanely useful tool for story analysis. It's just not a particularly useful method for story development.
The beautiful thing about three-act structure is how it applies to virtually any popular story. ROMEO AND JULIET? It works. OF MICE AND MEN? It works. LEGALLY BLONDE? It works. PULP FICTION? It works. Even individual episodes of popular TV shows can be broken down using the three-act structure.
Basic Three-Act Structure
The basic gist of the three-act structure is this:
First Act: Character introductions. Establish a world. Create a problem.
Second Act: Complicate the problem. Let the characters struggle to get what they want. Let this struggle altar the established world in some way. Let the bad guys gain ground and the good guys loose ground. Bring in allies and henchmen. Offer the audience the possibility of a happy resolution and then threaten it that happiness every chance you get.
Third Act: Bring the story to its conclusion. The good guys and bad guys face off. The good guys either win or they lose forever. The bad guys either win or they lose forever. The world you established in the first act is either restored to its original state or forever altered.
Based on the above three-act structure, the meat of the story is found in act-two. If the first act drags out too long, people get bored with the story. That's why you'll often find writers pressured to get into act two sooner. The balance here is that if the characters and world are not properly established in the first act, the audience won't care when the story transitions into the second act.
So, what if you don't have your story written yet? How useful is the three-act structure? Every writer should instinctually know that you need a beginning, middle, and end to your story. What many writers don't seem to know instinctually is how the beginning of a story works, how the middle of the story works, and how the end works.This is where three-act structure leaves a writer hanging.
Way back in kindergarten, this illiterate writer was taught a basic story structure that involved the following elements: opening, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. This simplified model is based on a five-act structure and is also known as basic dramatic structure. Below is a graphic representation of this basic kindergarten model:
If you search the web, you'll find similar graphics on similar articles with a much more academic mindset. However, as the illiterate writer, my goal is to keep this as simple and straightforward as possible. I'm not writing this as a thesis, I'm trying to help you be a better writer.
If you look at the graphic above, you'll notice the tension in the story builds as the story progresses. Many similar graphics show hard points on the curve where this conflict / tension / stress curve changes abruptly. However, this is not always the case. In fact, because conflict / tension / stress is what keeps an audience hanging on, it is advisable to draw out the nights of your conflict / tension / stress as long as possible, making the climax as dramatic as possible, creating the most satisfying and memorable experience for your audience.
One thing I hope you notice is the continual escalation of conflict / tension / stress. In this representation, the escalation is smooth. In the real world, this escalation would look more like a stock-market chart with ups and downs and an overall upward or downward trend.
Let's look at the five parts of this basic story.
Basic Story Structure - Opening:
This is where the story begins. In the opening, you need to introduce the protagonist. You need to establish the world of the story. You need to make the audience care. This is where Blake Snyder advocates a "Save the Cat" moment.
We'll go into this aspect of storytelling later, but here's what you need to know now. The protagonist is the character through which the audience views the movie. The audience identifies with the protagonist. This is who the audience either relates to or wants to be. The more clearly you establish this bond between protagonist and audience, the more powerful your story will be.
The catch? You only have a few pages to accomplish this. Conventional wisdom in screenwriting says that by page ten, the reader needs to know what the story is about. Page TEN.
Basic Story Structure - Rising Action:
This is where the story officially kicks off, initiated by an inciting incident. In story terms, the rising action is a burning fuse on a stick of dynamite and the inciting incident is the match that lights the fuse.
A skillful writer may build an elaborate inciting incident with multiple parts. This would begin with the striking of the match and end with the lighting of the fuse. Think CASABLANCA, where the match is struck when Rick comes into possession of Nazi letters of transit, then the fuse is lit when Rick sees his old Ilsa wander into his nightclub with her fugitive husband in search of those same letters of transit. Or TITANIC, where the match is lit when Jack wins his tickets on Titanic in a card game, then later again when Jack sees Rose above decks for the first time, then the fuse is lit when Jack pulls Rose off the poop-deck railing after her aborted suicide attempt.
For the sake of discussion, we'll look at the inciting incident as one moment in the story. One singular moment that defines everything. This is the event that happens between opening and the rising action, the moment where the events of the story change direction irreversibly. After this, things cannot go back to the way they were without paying enormous cost. It is this cost—the price of failure—that will help motivate the protagonist to continue even though things get increasingly harder.
In short, rising action is the increasingly harder part of the story. Anything that makes life hard on the protagonist can be considered rising action. Rising action is the difficulty the protagonist faces in getting what they want. Rising action is the enemy onslaught in war that pins the good guys down. Rising action is the pride that keeps the guy from asking the girl out. Rising action is the storm that threatens to overturn the boat and drown everyone on it. Rising action is the growing sense of dissatisfaction the wife feels as she tries to keep a struggling marriage together.
Depending on the scope of the story, rising action can be one major event or a series of related events building up to the climax. Rising action creates a sense of conflict / tension / stress in the audience. Notice this conflict / tension / stress isn't about the protagonist at all, although if the audience identifies with the protagonist, they will feel what the protagonist feels—this only works if the audience can identify with the hopes / desires / needs of the protagonist. If the audience doesn't care, no amount of rising action will make them care, which is why it is so important to create that connection between audience and protagonist.
Basic Story Structure - Climax:
There's an old saying, what goes up must come down. This is an immutable law of physics. Throw a baseball up in the air, and it will eventually stop going up and start coming down. Fire a rifle straight up into the air and the bullet will eventually stop going up and start coming down. The more force is involved in getting the object up in the air, the higher it will go before it starts coming down again.
The climax of your story is the moment all the rising action stops rising. It's the moment of maximum tension. There can't be any more stress or conflict. If you were stretching a rubber band to see how far it can stretch, the climax would be the moment the rubber band breaks. This is the moment everything in the story is building up to.
The climax is the moment that essentially completes the story. It's inevitable, unavoidable despite repeated attempts to avoid it. In many ways, the climax is the entire point of the story. Everything in a well-built story leads to the climax. Anticipation of the climax is what keeps audiences watching.
In a classic Western, the climax would be the moment when the good guy and the bad guy get into a shootout. In a romance, this is the moment when the girl chooses the guy or vice-versa. This is where the good guy and bad guy face off, where the girl chooses her guy, where the Titanic sinks and our heroes find some way to survive in that dark, icy ocean.
The climax also represents a moment of change for the protagonist. Growth, change of priorities, the summoning of unknown strength, or humbling and seeking help from others.
The climax should be structured so that the outcome is continually in question until the very last moment.
Basic Story Structure - Falling Action:
Falling action happens after the climax. It's the fallout. It's the release of anticipation. It's the establishing of a new world or the return of the old world order. Notice how how relatively slowly the tension builds during rising action compared to the release during falling action after the climax of the story. Tension falls at least three-times faster than it rises.
Think of conflict / tension / stress like a watermelon. If you were to tie this watermelon to a gigantic helium balloon, it would slowly rise high into the air. If you were to shoot that balloon with a rifle or crossbow or whatever—if you pop that balloon, the falling action would be the falling of that watermelon.
During falling action, all the tension you've built over the course of the story releases. All the loose ends get tied, any open storylines are closed. This is the process of saying goodbye to your audience, providing them with closure, giving the audience the satisfaction of seeing what it is they've longed to see throughout the movie.
Basic Story Structure - Resolution:
Basically, this is the end of your story. Think of the resolution as a reward to the audience. This is where you'll drive home the emotional message of the story. Often, the resolution is tied to the opening or rising action in such a way that the story comes full circle.
In TITANIC, the movie opens with a deep-sea expedition searching for a priceless necklace believed to be lost on the ship; the movie ends with that same necklace dropped into the ocean and a farewell sequence in which everyone the audience cared about throughout the story is reunited. In the opening sequence of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, Indiana Jones loses a priceless artifact after risking his life to obtain it; at the resolution, Indiana Jones loses the Ark of the Covenant when the government elects to place it in storage in a massive warehouse. In CASABLANCA, the film opens with Rick sternly warning his friend that he sticks his neck out for no one; the story ends with Rick not only risking his life for Ilsa and Laszlo, but making plans for future adventures with Captain Renault.
Good writers find a way to reward their audiences at the end. Think of a video game you may have played in your youth, did you ever feel cheated when you spent hours trying to beat a game only to have the ending be a letdown? The same let-down feeling applies to audiences and movies too.
Basic Dramatic Structure vs. Three-Act Structure
In this illiterate writer's opinion, the five-part basic story structure is much better suited for story development purposes. That doesn't mean the three-act structure is inherently different than the five-part basic story structure outlined above. In fact, if you overlay the two, you'll find that they line up very well.
We'll talk more about three-act structure in another post, but notice in the overlay how the climax lines up with the transition from act two into act three.
Is this is the be-all, end-all way to approach story development? Absolutely not. However, the vast majority of commercially successful stories will fit this pattern.
As you develop your story, create your outlines, and eventually write your masterpiece, keep this basic dramatic structure in mind. If you do, you'll go a long way to increasing the quality of your work and maybe even selling your work and making a living as a writer.
It can't hurt, can it?
-The Illiterate Writer.
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