The Acts of a Story, Part 1

An act is a tool for dividing a story into the stages of the hero’s transformation.

In a logline, a single clause can refer to an entire act.

As you review various logline templates (see my previous post “The Logline”), you will notice a couple things.

First, you’ll find recurrent elements like the hero, the hero’s desire, the antagonist, and the stakes. For example, a superspy tries to stop a supervillain from detonating a nuclear bomb. That’s pretty general and could describe anything from a spy novel to a Mission Impossible movie to an episode of 24, but you’ve still got hero, desire, antagonist, and stakes. I’ve talked a bit about these elements, but there’s something else in loglines that I haven’t talked about yet.

Acts!

And so, second, you’ll find, in logline templates, references to acts.

Well, what the heck are those? What’s an act?

Stories can be divided into acts, but how those acts are divided varies, in practice, according to . . . any number of factors. 

A playwright can chop up a play into acts based on when they think the audience needs an intermission, which affords time to, say, change the set on stage. Novelists can ignore acts altogether if they want. A novel can be purely experimental, a stroll in prose through a character’s mind. Genre novelists think more about acts, and screenwriters love thinking about acts.

So do I.

And I’ll tell you one great personal reason why I love acts: they tell me where to put my thoughts.

I have way too many ideas, way too many thoughts, way too much to say about my character and the world and everything else. But dumping all this onto the page at once would be a disaster for the reader of the novel. 

Without acts, I’d be firehosing the reader with exposition.

An act, for me, is like a bucket with a label on it. I have a thought. I find the bucket. I put that thought in the bucket. I organize a Google doc with subtitles for each act. I type my notes. I copy/paste those notes under the subtitle of the appropriate act.

I need that organization, or else I’m likely to write something in the first act that I shouldn’t have written until the last act.

I know the story, but the hero has to live the experience. I see the maze from the clouds while the hero races down a single corridor. As the author, I am in danger of expressing a thought way earlier than the hero would have had access to that thought. I am in danger of expressing a feeling that the hero would not have felt yet. The acts help me align myself with the hero’s experience.

And that helps me align the reader with the hero’s experience.

A story is a dramatization of the transformation of the hero, and acts are the stages of that transformation.

So I gotta start with the caterpillar. If I’m not careful, I’ll talk too early about the cocoon and way too early about the butterfly. That undercuts the drama of the story.

I have to remember that I’m not writing an essay. I’m not solving the hero’s problems. I’m dramatizing the hero’s experience. I’m writing a story filled with conflict.

I know what kind of writer I am: I go way too fast. So I need acts to slow me down, to help me put the hero under pressure, and to build a dramatic experience with progressive acts rather than suck the life out of the story with static exposition.

During story development, I know I can’t control when or how fast my thoughts bloom in my brain. But when I divide my story into acts, I know where to put those thoughts. I organize them into the buckets called Act One, Act Two, Act Three, and Act Four.

I organize my story into four acts. Other screenwriters use three acts, but they divide the second act into two parts.

So while you’ll see most screenwriters refer to Act 1, Act 2a, Act 2b, and Act 3, I choose to use Acts 1–4. It’s the same thing. I’m referring to the exact same dynamic, and the acts are close to the same length, with exceptions (Act 1 is often the shortest).

In a screenplay, you won’t see “Act 2” written on the page. The acts are hidden. That’s because acts are another way of thinking (another tool) for story development. In my novels, I include the subheads for Acts 1–4 so the reader can see them. It’s a me thing.

To move from Act 1 to Act 2, the hero makes a major dramatic choice. To move into the final act, the hero makes another major dramatic choice. In the midpoint of the story, however, the hero doesn’t make a similar dramatic choice. In fact, the hero is often reactive at the midpoint, chased, if you will, into the next act. This difference in the nature of the transition at the midpoint is why screenwriters still use Acts 1–3, on the theory that what starts a new act is only the hero’s dramatic choice.

An act represents the stage of a character’s growth in the story. 

If we’re in the first act, then the hero is in the Before stage of their growth. The traditional acts one, two, and three might be called the Before, During, and After stages of a hero’s transformation.

In The Scarlet Letter, we meet Hester Prynne in Act 1 when she’s suffering in order to keep her lover’s identity a secret. Then Arthur Dimmesdale arrives, and she agrees to keep his secret as long as he agrees to keep hers. That begins Act 2, the During section of Hester’s transformation. It’s tense. How will she live? How will she raise her daughter? How can she keep all these secrets and live a good life? In the final act, we see Hester Prynne undergoing her final stage of growth. The secrets are revealed, her dreams are shattered, and she cannot depend on the men in her life. She is changed, forever.

A hero is transformed by the story. 

I like to write stories about the positive transformation of a single, active, self-aware hero. So here’s one way I think about the acts.

The old world of an old self going nowhere in Act 1: The hero’s initial self is lacking. The hero needs to grow but isn’t sure how. They have a desire, and the world comes knocking with an opportunity, although it comes at a cost. The hero takes action, despite the cost.

The new world of a striving self making progress in Act 2: The hero is trying hard to grow in this new way. It’s a new world with new rules. The hero is growing internally during the process of striving for an external goal.

The dangerous world of a twisted self descending into the failure of Act 3: At the peak of their progress, the hero meets the antagonist. Secrets are revealed. A betrayal is set in motion. The hero fails to such an extent that they regret ever doing it this way.

The synthesized world of a new self emerging in Act 4: The hero finds a new way to achieve the goal. This too fails, but they try one last time, learn their lesson, find what they need, and succeed. The hero has become a full personality.

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PHOTO: I use a chart to plot my novels by acts and chapters. This is from a chart I used for Idol Wish.