The Acts of a Story, Part 3

We drop into the inner workings of an act.

It’s sometimes a lot to take, thinking about stories in abstractions. And there are so many levels of abstractions! Let’s just write a story!

Not yet.

Let’s drop into the inside of the acts, although we’re still pretty abstract here. And I’m still talking about the kind of story I like to write: the kind of story in which a hero learns and grows from their experience (in other words, not a tragedy). This kind of story structure does not mean you have to write a certain genre of story. You can still follow along and use this to write a romantic comedy, an action comedy, a superhero story, a road-trip story, a coming-of-age story, a monster story, or a mystery.

The nature of the experience that changes the hero can be falling in love with another person, working with an annoying partner to nail the bad guy, assuming responsibility for a special superpower, going on a journey with a misfit crew, experiencing your first crush on summer break, confronting and killing a monster, or solving a tough case.

The kind of experience the hero goes through on their way to lasting personal change might determine the genre. But the dynamic process of how a hero changes through these four acts remains, at this level of abstraction, remarkably similar in all of these genres.

That’s for the reason I discussed in the previous blog entry: we human beings learn stuff and grow in a very similar way.

Act 1

In the first half of the act, the hero is stuck in their world. They want something (setup desire) but don’t know how to get it. The hero doesn’t know what they really need, not yet. This is what Blake Snyder calls the thesis world or “Stasis = Death,” which you saw in the STC logline template.

The catalyst arrives (which is the world knocking on the hero’s door) and presents an opportunity, with a catch, for the hero to get what they want. The hero resists this costly dilemma, debates other ways to resolve the dilemma, and ends the act by letting go of their old self and choosing to seize this opportunity, despite the cost.

Act 2

The hero enters a new world with new rules and meets new characters. It’s a bumpy ride for the hero, having to learn all this new stuff, but it’s fun for the audience. Midway through this act, the hero reaches a milestone in their progress toward the goal of their setup desire. It’s good to have this mid-act milestone for two reasons: you need your audience to see your hero making solid progress toward their goal, and you, as a writer, need an anchor point to write toward as your hero pursues their desire.

Soon after the milestone, we reach the midpoint scenes or chapters. Don’t think of it as a point, something small. It’s really a midpoint section of the whole story. As we move from Act 2 to Act 3, there are several events that may span scenes or chapters at the end of Act 2 and the start of 3. The midpoint is best thought of as a large catalyst or accelerant. There might be a celebration, social gathering, or party to symbolize the hero’s progress and to bring the hero and antagonist together in a way that makes sense. Deadlines may be set. A revelation may occur. A betrayal may be revealed. Clocks start ticking (literally or figuratively), and the hero reacts.

Act 3

Midpoint scenes occur at both the end of Act 2 and in the beginning of Act 3. Blake Snyder calls this act “bad guys closing in” or BGCI. This is the act in which the hero has to pay the cost of choosing to go after their goal in the Act 2 way. This is the “catch” inherent in their Act 1 dilemma. The bad guys are making progress with their plan, and the hero is reactive: playing catch up, losing control, getting desperate while they’re on the run.

Somewhere just after the middle of this act, the hero faces the lowest point in their transformation: the death moment. And by “death,” we mean the death of their Act 2 self. The hero is in a limbo of failure. The hero renounces their setup desire: they wish they’d never done it this way. Look at the cost that had to be paid! But then another spark lights up their life, reminds them of who they are and what’s most important, and now they’re newly determined to press on. They can’t be their Act 2 self anymore. They have to let that self go. They know who they have to become and what they have to do, no matter the consequences.

Act 4

In this act, the hero has a bold desire and a new plan. The hero works to synthesize their Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3 selves. In the final act, you’ll often see a combination of settings, characters, and rules that the hero encountered in previous acts. The hero is making their own rules as they make a new plan, get new gear, and form a new team (all elements likely introduced in the prior acts). They execute this plan, which fails in dramatic fashion.

You’ll notice that there’s a recurrent beat in the middle (or close to the middle) of every act that greatly affects the hero’s transformation: the catalyst in Act 1, the milestone in Act 2, the death moment in Act 3, and the resurrection in Act 4. The Act 4 resurrection sequence starts after what Blake Snyder calls the “Dig Deep” beat, which is the hero processing the failure of their first plan, and lasts several beats or scenes in which the hero has lost the gear and the team and is on their own. It looks like the hero’s going to lose, again.

But somehow the hero finds the inner strength to keep going. It’s finally hitting the hero what they really need. It takes the resurrection beat to make this, at last, sink into our hero’s consciousness. They finally know who they’ve become (hence the term resurrection: they are reborn into their final selves).

This knowledge spurs the hero toward the final showdown, which can last several scenes or chapters. The hero faces their fears, learns their lesson, and confronts the antagonist for the final time. The antagonist may tempt our hero with one last chance to go back to the way things were. No, sir. After the showdown, the hero emerges to process their success. The hero has changed forever and is a full personality, a synthesized self.

We’ll get even deeper into the inner workings of the acts in subsequent entries, but this is enough, for now, to bring us back to the logline template.

When you see references to the acts, you should now have a better sense of what the heck they’re talking about. Here’s my template for the Primal Dilemma logline. See if things don’t pop with meaning a little more for you now.

A flawed hero in the stagnant world of Act 1 . . . must learn to synthesize their Act 4 lesson and learn what they truly need . . . before their Act 1 setup desire to achieve their goal the Act 2 way . . . threatens to end in the death moment of Act 3 and a reversal of their setup desire.

Here’s an example for SmartHome Rebel:

A rebellious young test subject who wants to escape her prototype smarthome . . . must learn the true meaning of freedom . . . before her decision to grow up according to the training program . . . proves, against her wishes, that the insidious smarthome is a success and thus results in hundreds of other children being imprisoned in their own smarthomes.

And here’s an example from The Matrix (1999):

A restless young computer hacker who wants to meet the notorious Morpheus to learn what The Matrix is . . . must learn to believe in himself . . . before his decision to pursue his destiny as “The One” . . . endangers the life of Morpheus, his mentor and friend.

You can see in my Primal Dilemma logline template that I’m focusing on the acts as stages of the hero’s transformation. I’m not adding the B Story or even the antagonist. I’ll add those in other loglines, like the STC versions. I draw on several different types of loglines as tools in the process of developing my story.

Remember that you never really finish a logline. Loglines are just tools to get you thinking about how the parts of your story fit together. You use many loglines to develop your story. Think of acts the same way. The acts have a lot of abstract stuff inside them, but they’re useful tools for a writer looking to develop the logline of their story idea into a fully dramatic story of the transformation of a hero. 

How do you take the single sentence of a logline and expand it into a novel of 300 pages? 

To expand a logline into a novel, I use acts and all these cool mechanisms contained within them, all these cool things that other writers over the eons have put to use for them in their stories.

I find it very useful to continually put what I’ve learned from other writers into my own words, to repeat what I’ve learned over and over until it sinks in, until I synthesize it, until I make it my own. That’s part of the process. 

I didn’t make up the above abstractions about story structure. I gleaned this stuff from the advice of the hundred other writers I’ve read. For years, I’ve taught writing in school, and so now it’s ingrained in me. Now I can play with this structure as I write my own books. That, I think, is your goal, too: to take these tools (the logline, the act), to express them in your own words, to try and teach others if you can (which can be very inspiring), and to use them to build your own story.

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PHOTO: Chart for Idol Wish