Four-Act Structures: Prioritizing Character Arcs
Previously in this series: Three-Act Structure: Prioritizing Brisk Plot
This is a bit of a weird one, partly because the four-act structure is “fake” and “functionally as the same three-act structure, Leighton, come on.” I’m the first to admit the four-act structure is just the three-act structure paced out differently—but on the other hand, some three-act structure visualizations show Act II split into “Act 2A” and “Act 2B.”
That’s just cowardly. Deviate from established convention, you reprobate. I don’t agree with everything FILMHULK has to say about it, but I agree with this much: the three-act structure as the alleged paradigm of story pacing needs to be dethroned. A convincing case for a four-act structure is within reach, especially for character stories that require a little more time for arc exploration.
If you google four-act structures, you’ll get a lot of diagrams for it that are, in my opinion, bad. Here’s an example of a three-act structure that is lying to you about what it is:
This is a three-act structure with a complex. From a writer’s perspective, if you’re going to write to four acts, you have to do it with more purposeful difference from the traditional three acts than this.
Four-Act Structure: For Correct Pacing of Character-Driven Plots
I had a joke here about how four acts prolong your character’s agony, but I got a dispatch that apparently that’s “unappealing” and “readers don’t want to feel bad”? Regardless of the nature of the emotional exploration, what four acts do provide is a lot more room to explore the nitty gritties of an internal conflict.
I most often use four-act structures when I’m writing romance novels. Most romance novels are more character-driven than plot-driven, and readers want to spend time with a character’s interiority, basking in the emotions and butterflies of it all. I mean to say that four acts work best for stories where the conflict is primarily internal, and internality and emotion need more space in the text. In some action-driven genres, characters mostly just react to events while the focus remains on the event itself; by contrast, in character-driven novels, the reader is inhabiting characters’ perspectives and lives more immersively.
When outlining a new romance project, I start with an adapted version of Gwen Hayes’ Romancing the Beat template (found here). This beat sheet is the best argument for a four-act structure I have found. It overtly and very helpfully lays out the genre-conventional story beats of a romance novel organized in four acts. You can see the bones of a three-act structure in it: Acts II and III still explore the tension, but they do it in a more strategic way.
The primary reason to write to any act structure is to pace out your story beats correctly. Hayes’ beat sheet demonstrates how this works excellently. Let’s break down its pivot points:
The Act I beat is still the end of the setup—the plot push where, for one reason or another, the characters can’t return to where they began.
Act II is for exploring all the feelings related to the conflict the characters feel between desire and reason, the conflict between their interior desire and the realities of their world. The Act II pivot point, meanwhile, is actually much more substantial than the Act I plot push: the characters act on their desires, “resolving” the conflict by engaging in the romance against their better judgment.
Act III re-integrates the pressures of the real world, forcing passion aside in favour of earthbound reason. The Act III pivot point is a reversal of the Act II pivot point: instead of desire winning out, this time reason does, “resolving” the conflict the other way.
Act IV is the only true resolution: instead of siding on one side of the “conflict” or the other, the characters remove the incompatibility of the two and find a way to marry their real-world realities with desire.
Generalizing this for non-romance character stories:
Act I justifies why the character(s) shouldn’t do X (comparing desire against reality);
Act II is doing it anyway (siding with desire);
Act III is slowly reaping the consequences (sitting with reality);
Act IV is reckoning (desire and reality in one world).
For me, four-act structures also help me to intentionally to balance inward- and outward-focused character arcs when plotting. Act I is exploration/discovery of self; Act II has the characters getting to know each other; and Act III has the characters getting to know the new version of themself and the other person. This culminates in catastrophe—but in Act IV they use the skills they learned in the first three acts to pull themselves together.
Breaking up emotional exploration in this way isn’t a rule. I fuck with structure with every book I write. But in character-driven stories like romances, reader investment is obviously in the character arc, and you need to spend enough time with it, which means the book is tasked with exploring the transformation of characters’ sense of self, priorities, and values over time.
For me, the four-act structure helps balance a character’s self and world by alternating between them. This prevents me stagnating too much with one or the other.
In other words, I use the four-act structure like I use any act structure: for pacing.
When Four Acts Are A Structural Necessity: What Teleplays Tell Us
There’s being intentional with your act structure, and then there’s being forced to write a story divided into four because network television forces commercial breaks every 13 minutes.
It’s one thing to divide a story over a midpoint; it’s another to make that midpoint dramatic enough that the viewer’s compelled to stick around through two minutes of advertising. Notably, television is often also character-focused. As a teen and young adult, I watched primarily television—movies are my pop culture weak area. I watched television because I liked investing in the characters; I write character-driven novels for the same reason.
Thanks for reading “Four-Act Structures Are Real and Good,” brought to you by: network television.
Network television is not structured in four acts because it’s best for the story. They’re just working within the confines of the rules. Fortunately, great creativity can spring from confines. The forced significance of a teleplay’s midpoint gives it structural variance from the three-act standby and creates the argument for different pivot points in storytelling.
A teleplay that speaks convincingly in favour of four acts is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 3 episode “Homecoming.” Buffy and Cordelia spend the first two acts of the episode at odds when they both decide to run for prom queen. As a result of their fighting, they wind up marooned in the woods by their exhausted friends and become jointly hunted by a bunch of demon bounty hunters.
They realize at the end of Act II that they have to work together, which kicks off the “consequences” portion of the story. Act III sees them reaping the consequences of their rash behavior, while Act IV brings these thread together.
There are a few ways to interpret this episode’s structure. One is through the lens of a two-act structure, which are most common in musical theatre. A two-act structure isn’t interesting enough (read: I don’t have enough training or chops) to devote a whole article to, but it’s basically divided into Actions (Act I) and Consequences (Act II). The only serious pivot point is at the height of narrative tension between the two acts, compelling theatregoers to come back after the intermission. Many plays can be viewed through another lens and interpreted as three acts instead, with the intermission at the traditional midpoint. I know even less about theatre than I do about movies, but regardless of how you want to interpret the network confines of a teleplay, sometimes it has a similar tension distribution as intermission-structured stories.
But another way to look at this Actions versus Consequences division is through the lens we outlined above. Like in the romance structure outlined above, the first two acts of the story work to establish characters’ sense of self, exposing both Buffy and Cordelia’s separate motives, followed by the interpersonal: their slow acquaintance with and understanding of each other’s motives. Act III, then, is devoted to what happens when they’re launched into a situation together instead of apart, while Act IV wraps up everything they learned over the course of the story.
This lens requires that the episode is character-centred to really work. There are plenty of episodes of Buffy that don’t fit into this mold. I’ve also seen a four-act structure described where Act II is characterized as “reconnaissance” and Act III is characterized as “attack.” This may be another way of interpreting the getting to know each other / facing an obstacle together framing, and can be functionally applied to this episode as well.
But, notably, “Homecoming” is structurally very similar to a romance plot. MC1, Buffy is living an extraordinary life and wants do one normal thing: run for prom queen. MC2, Cordelia—whose popularity declined after her friends learned she was dating known loser Xander Harris—is trying to reclaim her lost glory. The episode is a deep dive on these individual characters’ internal conflicts (desires) as well as the fragility of their allyship against the world of demons (reality). In Act II, desire wins out; in Act III, reality wins out; in Act IV, the beleaguered pair returns to the prom injured and muddied in their prom dresses, bodily representing the merge between what they want and the lives they’re actually living.
So pleased we’ve established what really matters here: that Buffy/Cordelia is a canonical enemies-to-lovers romance. Good talk! Moving on—
The Hero’s Journey Is Four Acts Actually
Let’s impose a four-act lens on one more common story structure. People hate to talk about the Hero’s Journey, but it’s going to be relevant to my discussion of the five-act structures anyway, so we may as well get into it now.
This motherfucker. What a tool.
The Hero’s Journey is one of those balls-old establishments of writing that people have strong opinions against for the sole reason that it’s been done to death—it’s 2500 years old. But doneness and history aside, it’s really just a way to frame your story, the way act structures are frames. If you’re trying to figure out how to structure your novel, there’s no reason not to case the Hero’s Journey for parts. I do it all the time. My personal five-act structure template is an expanded, amended, and paced out Hero’s Journey.
A classic example of the Hero’s Journey well executed is Tolkien. “There and Back Again,” right? What really defines the Hero’s Journey is its reliance on two spheres: Normal World and Bizarro World. More specifically, it relies on the hero traveling between them.
On this definition, our episode of Buffy counts as a hero’s journey. Buffy and Cordelia begin and end in the familiar territory of high school civic engagement. In the middle, they enter the bizarro world of demon bounty hunters. At the end, bounty hunters defeated, they exit bizarro world again.
The classic conceptualization of Hero’s Journey wants to be understood in three acts. Acts I and III take place in Normal World, while an extended Act II carries out in Bizarro World. This is one perfectly valid way to look at Hero’s Journey—but I think it’s also easily conceptualized in four acts.
The reason is the substantial eighth beat—Death and Rebirth. This kind of language is significant enough to me to represent not a midpoint, but a pivot point.
The distinction between these is muddy and, like the rest of this essay, ultimately made-up. Again, I have no formal education or training in any of this. But just based on storytelling instincts, my argument is that if you, your sense of self, or the world you left behind fully dies in the middle of the story, be it literally or figuratively…
Baby, that’s a pivot point.
It’s technically a midpoint too because it happens in the middle of the story. But bro, if you, like, die—your beloved “Act 2b” is actually its own arc now. Now you have to deal with being dead, which is not something that’s going to be handled with a single story beat in the back half of the exploration portion of a character-focused story. “Act 2b is gonna explore the tension of being dead, when previously you were alive.” Act 2B! Give your character more space to deal with being dead than “Whoa, I’m a ghost now! Anyway, better finish my tasks.” This isn’t Among Us.
I realize this is pedantic. But—like the pivot points at the end of three-act structure’s Acts I and II—in a character-focused story, “Death and Rebirth” has to be treated as a point of no return. You can’t argue that “I’ve left my home and can’t return” is more significant to a character from a structural point of view than “I have died.”
I mean all this in the figurative sense of “Death and Rebirth” as well. Buffy and Cordelia’s hopes of a normal high school election are dashed when they realize they are being hunted by demons in the woods. This readily counts as a Death and Rebirth. Would-be prom queens Buffy and Cordelia are dead now; in their place are demon fighters Buffy and Cordelia, who can’t have nice things.
Everything I’ve said justifies traditional three-act wisdom if you prefer it, of course. At the midpoint, the heroine hits an obstacle, her path is changed, there is some despair. A comprehensive redefinition of self happens in both three- and four-act structures—but the difference lies in which of the four main components of a story you’re foregrounding in this project: setting, plot question, character arc, or event. If the ultimate focus is on plot question or event, the heroine’s interiority is probably secondary to the story about the world. This story can be more easily be understood in three acts.
But if the story’s ultimate focus is on the character, her character redefinition after a “Death and Rebirth” midpoint needs more exploration. This story may be better understood in four acts over three.
The only major distinction between a three- and four-act structure is: a four-act is a three-act structure that has been given permission to make character growth a major pivot point in the story.
It also grants permission to slow down the breakneck pace favoured by three acts and take a little longer in the story. Depending on how you approach that permission, changing your mindset to four acts may change the whole shape of your manuscript. You may need to create more space for internal motivations; you may need to rebalance how you’re approaching internal versus interpersonal relations. You may need to hit different story beats to make sure the stakes feel sufficiently personal to the reader, or hit certain ones harder than you would have in a three-act story. You may need to shift things around to correct for pacing. This new emphasis can allow genre conventions to flourish, as in romance, or establish stronger thematic leads in other types of story.
I’m very excited to write out my thoughts on five-act structure. The document is still blank and has been for weeks, and every time I open it my jaunty hat falls off to consider the scope of the task. Five-act structures are my favourite and they are unknowable to me, but we’re gonna figure it out right here on OUT OF CHARACTER.
Which you have been reading. Stay tuned for five acts two weeks from now. In the meanwhile, let’s put something on the page.