Three-Act Structures: Prioritizing Brisk Plot
Until recently, I was what NaNoWriMo calls a “pantser”—someone who starts writing with absolutely no sense of where they’re trying to go. Around three years ago, I noticed I often instinctively divide stories into three parts and decided to lean into that instinct. I never pants anymore nowadays. It’s almost a tragedy, except that my stories are now much better paced.
Pacing is my fundamental understanding of what act structures are for. Beginning writers, myself included, often have a lot of questions about how to control pacing in our writing. This is the first in a series of posts about different kinds of act structures: three-, four-, five-, and seven-act structures, and how each one helps to foreground a particular element of a story. If you’re a pantser and you want not to be, or you want to learn how to do pacing in a novel-length work, I posit that act structures are the place to start.
Before I get too far into this, I want to be clear that I have absolutely no formal training in English, writing, or media studies. I took one (1) literature class in my literal first semester of university as part of a sampler pack to make sure I wanted to major in History (and I did). Absolutely everything I know about writing has been self-taught or intuited; none of my actual craft advice is informed by anything so institutional as an MFA. This is just one way to look at act structures, and like all writing advice, you should throw it out if it doesn’t work for you. That said, in my humble opinion:
Three-act structures are best for foregrounding plot.
Having no formal education in writing or critical media studies myself, I learn a hell of a lot from craft books, YouTube, and podcasts. This month I’m heavily into, among other things, Lindsay Ellis’ back catalogue. She notes a common debate among filmgoers: how many acts does a movie actually have? It’s possible for one person to watch a movie and see three acts, while another sees five.
(the video in question)
This is because act structures are just theory: a lens someone can affix to a story to make sense of how it unfolds. A consumer of media can look at a story and decide it has three acts, four acts, five acts, or seven acts. All these viewers are doing is deciding how many pivot points the movie has.
Pivot points are story beats that change the trajectory of the story. The number of pivot points in a story is one thing that significantly impacts your story’s pacing. Three-act stories have two pivot points: one at the end of Act I, and one at the end of Act II. Four-act stories have three pivot points, five-act stories have four, and so on.
This is easily said, but on its face says nothing about how to structure stories as writers. You can decide to put two pivot points in the story—but does that actually help you organize or meaningfully pace out your story?
FILMHULK once argued that the three-act structure is made-up. On the one hand, he’s right: this is just made-up theory. On the other, all theory is made up—but that doesn’t make it less useful to understanding story structure. FILMHULK prefers to count story beats in a movie, which is fair enough, but missing from his analysis (at first; hypocritically, he comes out in favour of the five-act structure later in the article) is that act structures also count and organize story beats.
Simply, acts are just ways of understanding and organizing the scenes of your story. FILMHULK tries to argue that a movie can have “twenty acts” in what is possibly the most outlandish take about acts there is. This is not correct. A story might have twenty story beats or, god help it, twenty pivot points. But an act is a way of grouping story beats together to understand what each scene is working toward—it is not a story beat itself.
FILMHULK likes the five-act structure better for one simple reason: according to him, it’s paced “better.” Five-act stories prioritize different things, and probably should be used more often in Hollywood blockbusters (nb: they won’t be), but a three-act structure’s pacing is often ideal for telling a plot-driven story, which most movies are.
Personally, I use different act structures depending on the genre I’m writing in. For shorter works like novelettes or novellas, I’m more likely to use three; I use four in romance; and I use five in science fiction and fantasy. To say the same thing a different way: if I want something fast-paced or action-based, I’m more likely to use the snappier three-act structure. If I need more room for exposition, character development, or complicated tension, I’ll likely use a four-act structure. And a five-act structure is best for dense stories with multiple subplots and heavy worldbuilding.
Three-act structures done right enforce a faster pace, hold reader attention, and simplify scene organization.
Three-act structure is old as fuck, and there’s a reason it’s favoured. If it works for you and your story, feel bolstered by the fact that it’s old as balls and tried & true. Ninety to 120 minutes is sometimes a pretty awkward amount of time to try to contain a good story, especially with modern film’s reliance on visual effects to make a movie allegedly “good” to look at. Three-act structures (should) enforce that we’re not in the theatre for 150 minutes by keeping things moving along.
Because of our familiarity with stories structured this way, writing in three acts may also come naturally to us. This is a good enough reason to use three acts! We may write this way even if we have no conscious knowledge of doing so. Three-act stories often just “feel” right to us. That’s also because of another good writing rule, the “rule of three.” Apart from creating good cadence in writing and creating a feeling of balance, the rule of three can also remind writers how to create motif around a particular theme in the story: setup, remind, and payoff. Just as two points are a coincidence and three form a pattern, two callbacks is repetition; three is motif.
This “rule of three” is also the basic logic of a three-act narrative structure. Your goal with Act I is to set something up; Act II to create tension about it; and Act III to resolve it.
(This graphic actually shows three different ways to visualize a three-act structure. All are overly simplistic, especially “plot points 1” and “2”—they mean pivot points 1 and 2—but I favour Setup-Confrontation-Resolution or Setup-Tension-Catharsis most.)
Conceptualizing your story in terms of Setup-Tension-Catharsis is an easy way to start organizing your scenes, even if you don’t settle on a three-act structure in the end. This is true of stories of any length, from short stories to novels. With some stories, especially character-driven ones, “plot” as such isn’t nearly as important—but I have read novel-length character studies, and they are broadly not satisfying to read because there’s no build and release. If you want your story to build and release, Setup-Tension-Catharsis is the place to start.
An erroneous adage often told about writing is that your story must have conflict. This is not true—but it should have tension. It can be internal character tension—for example, that a woman realizes her beliefs are contradictory. To tell this story, you have to set up what her beliefs are (Act I) in order to define the tension between her initial beliefs and a situation that challenges them (Act II). Then you have to find a way to resolve that tension—perhaps by having her change her beliefs, by taking an action that affirms one over the other, or by making it so the beliefs no longer contradict (Act III).
(See the triangle? TRIangle? Threes are everywhere.)
Act II is the problem child of three-act structures.
Act II—being the exploration of the tension, the story beats between recognizing it and resolving it—often either feels either too short or too long in three-act structures. Four- and five-act structures help to prevent this by complicating our understanding of which story beat goes where; it’s not true, for example, that set-up must always front-load background and exposition as this visualization of the three-act structure seems to suggest. Such a belief has produced many a bad story, as proven often in recent movies that make Act I way too long and Act II way too short. By minimizing the length of the second act, these movies cheapen consumers’ feeling of catharsis by failing to adequately explore the tension they’ve so painstakingly set up.
In her video above, Lindsay Ellis argues that act length isn’t as relevant as the function of each act. I agree with the sentiment—but often the length of an act or the percentage of the story each act takes up dictates how well the story as a whole is paced. As Emily VanDerWerff notes in the Vox article linked above, even formulaic (three-act) stories like Finding Dory pay off with consumers if they’re paced correctly.
You may write in three acts automatically. The structure may come naturally to you. But that doesn’t guarantee your story beats are paced out correctly within three acts, or that three acts is the structure your story is meant to have.
This brings us back to the concept of “pivot points”—places where a character makes a decision that propels the story forward. This idea of “propulsion” is key, and explains why the second act often feels to lag in a three-act structure. If the second act is meant to take up 50% of your story as suggested by some three-act models, that’s a long time not to provide your reader with a sense of propulsion.
(From Lindsay Ellis, “How Three-Act Screenplays Work (and why it matters)” linked above, 5:01. I think the second act should often not be this long, and if it is, the story had either better have a compelling midpoint or may best be reconsidered as four- or five-act structures. More on midpoints below.)
Pivot points are the key to recognizing the right act structure for your story.
In a three-act structure, the setup—Act I—usually ends with the “inciting incident,” when a character passes a point of no return: they embark on the arc of the story instead of turning around and going home. This “inciting incident” and the character deciding what to do about it, coupled with the climax/point of highest tension at the end of Act II, are the most defining moments of the three-act story. It is a simple structure in this way, and sometimes stories organized in three acts feel overly oriented toward the end, even rushed, because of this simplicity and the few points of true propulsion.
That’s not to say three-act structures can’t have a lot of components. As seen in the graphic above, three-act structures have many story beats and scenes that fill out the story and keep it moving. Lindsay Ellis does a great job of breaking down what these scenes can sometimes look like and, importantly, points out that individual tensions are often found within each scene.
I am reminded of something Mary Robinette Kowal said in an episode of Writing Excuses that resolving individual scenes too neatly can kill momentum in books. I think this is true—but at the same time, Ellis’ description of scenes as individual arcs is hugely useful to helping us understand how to structure our novels. It also explains what a “story beat” looks like: it’s less important than a pivot point, but it’s still a building block in the formation of your story and gives a sense of action and progression to get us between these main points of story propulsion.
In the early stages of planning your story—in outlining, for example, before you really section off your story by acts—you might describe your scenes in order of happening to figure out your protagonist’s trajectory. Understanding scenes as self-contained story beats with a beginning (setup), middle (tension), and end (resolution) ties in with the often-repeated wisdom that each scene must “do something” to progress the story. This idea gets a lot of pushback, especially in character-focused stories—but it is a good question to ask of each scene: what is the central tension in it, and how does the rise and fall of that individual tension build the overarching story?
If you don’t have an answer, it’s a good scene to cut, especially in three-act structures that work best with snappy pacing. You might find that your plot-centered story is best served by cutting a lot in general. But that said, as we’ve seen, the problem with many modern movies is that Act II is cut too short. One way to avoid this is to make sure your story doesn’t frontload exposition. Again—sorry, it’s a good video—Lindsay Ellis breaks down a common way three-act movies do this by making character motivations the B-plot (compared with the story-driven A plot) to be wrapped up at the end of the second act.
I think this is too rigid a framing for novel writing, but it is true that balancing your background exposition and distributing it throughout the story is a good way to keep your act lengths feeling balanced. Deepening character relationships later in the story, especially in an environment of tension, can be done by introducing a slow scene in the back half of the second act, where character or setting backstory is exchanged in dialogue.
This isn’t a cure-all, and expository dialogue is tricky to get right, but that’s one example of how to give readers a breather from the action and prevent Act I from feeling too long or Act II from feeling too short. It can also ironically build tension to give readers a break from the action—but, again, if it doesn’t propel the story, in a plot-driven narrative it may also be better to cut.
Organizing your story beats in point-form outline before you write is also a good way to figure out where your pivot points are. Which of these moments represent a point where the protagonist has to make a decision, or is forced to make a decision, that prevents them from returning to where the story started? Identifying how many of these are in your story can help you figure out how many acts to structure your scenes within. I find that my stories naturally split into three acts when I’m first conceptualizing them, and that it’s up to me to complicate that structure if I want to spend more time in certain areas.
(I have a post cued up about the four main guiding elements of a story—setting, plot question, character arc, and event—and how certain elements need to be foregrounded over others to stop a story feeling distracted and disorganized. Usually, three-act structures are best for event-oriented stories and some plot-oriented stories. If your story foregrounds character, setting, or more complicated plots over action, a different act structure might be best.)
In three-act structures, I think Act II needs to be paced more quickly than Act I or the denouement to create the sense of tension Act II is meant to explore. That’s not to say all second-act story beats should feel fast; as mentioned, slower scenes interspersed can give a sense of world or character and give the reader necessary time to breathe and process your plot. But it’s hard to figure out rules for where to put slower scenes and stop your second act from lagging.
This is where midpoints come in handy.
Midpoints change perspective without breaking the arc of tension. If they break the arc of tension, midpoints become pivot points and divide the second act into two.
I just made this rule up, but it’s the only way I can really make sense of midpoints. Consider this difference: if pivot points are your characters being bodily launched into a different stage of their life unable to return to where they just were, the midpoint is more often your narration forcing your characters’ heads to the side and pointing out something they haven’t noticed before. This new information or twist changes how the characters approach their arcs.
A midpoint can be a setback or a paradigm shift encountered in the middle of the tension—a person was looking for their daughter to keep her safe from the monster, but discover that the monster is their daughter; now they are still looking for their daughter, but to stop her ravaging the town. This is a midpoint because neither the character’s goals nor trajectory necessarily change; the protagonist still may be motivated to keep their daughter the monster safe. Only their perspective changes, and the arc of tension plods on.
If I wanted to turn the midpoint into a pivot point, I would more likely change the character’s goals as well: if they believe the monster must die, the character is launched into a world they can’t come back from where they are now finding their daughter to kill her instead of keeping her safe. Now, in my view, you have four acts instead of just three because there are three points in the narrative the protagonist can’t turn back from. When a midpoint is this substantial, I argue that you also need to give more time to the character’s processing of this new world, which fleshes out the newfound “third act” into a new arc in its own right.
But—as FILMHULK pointed out above—these are pretty arbitrary structures. Propulsion remains the most important thing about a story, and act structure matters way less than that the story is moving, characters’ situations are changing, and that there’s a good sense of tension that builds and resolves.
We’ll deconstruct another common narrative structure often conceptualized as three acts—the hero’s journey—when we discuss four-act structures just to prove how relative this all is. In the meanwhile, trust that three-act structures are a good initial way to build your story’s tension and resolution as you’re organizing your story’s scenes.
As always, you’ve been reading OUT OF CHARACTER. Let’s put something on the page.