#3 act structure

This is the method I've used as a loose guideline to write all 10 of my books.

You ever struggled to write a novel? Get a few thousand words in and stall, spinning wheels, for months or years? Well I'm here to tell you about mini-arcs or try-fail cycles. What you probably know about storytelling is that there is an inciting incident that disrupts the hero's life; what you may not know is that, following that inciting incident, the hero often finds themselves fighting against this disruption or working to resolve it in a series of try-fail cycles that increase conflict, tension, and stakes.

The hero tries to run from the change, to fight the change, or solve the problem, yet fails - until a climax is reached and a resolution can be found. Each "beat" can be a chapter, but you can also generally make sure your scenes serve a purpose and move the story along in this try-fail kinda way; remembering that the conflict needs to escalate with each "failure" (or as it is sometimes referred to, with the consequences of the hero's actions).

Within this structure, you have Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3 - set up, conflict, resolution. Within each act you have 3 blocks - a set up, conflict, and resolution. And within each block, you have three beats; a set up, conflict, and resolution. Hence, mini-arcs. If you have ever followed Save the Cat, you'll notice a lot of the beats within can overlay on these.

ACT 1 [SET UP]

BLOCK 1: Introduce the hero and their Ordinary World. (Sometimes referred to as Stasis.)

BEAT 1, the Introduction

BEAT 2, the Inciting Incident

BEAT 3, the Immediate Reaction to the Inciting Incident

BLOCK 2: A problem disrupts the hero’s life.

BEAT 4, the Prolonged Reaction; how the hero’s life has changed.

BEAT 5, the hero decides consciously or subconsciously to Take Action against that change.

BEAT 6, there are Consequences to that Decision to Act.

BLOCK 3: The hero’s life has changed direction.

BEAT 7, Pressure pushes the hero toward exploring this new world.

BEAT 8, a Pinch or Plot Twist the hero can’t ignore pushes them further.

BEAT 9, the hero is Pushed into the New World, Breaks into Act 2, either by another Decision to Act or the central conflict.

ACT 2 [CONFLICT]

BLOCK 4: The hero explores their New World.

BEAT 10, the hero is introduced to and explores their New World.

BEAT 11, has Fun & Games, events or conflicts that could only happen in this New World.

BEAT 12, explores the contrast between the Old World and the New.

BLOCK 5: The hero encounters a crisis of the New World.

BEAT 13, Builds Up to the conflict or Reversal of the Midpoint.

BEAT 14, is the Midpoint of the story—the point of no return where the stakes are raised.

BEAT 15, the Midpoint has immediately Reversed or changed things for the hero in this New World.

BLOCK 6: The hero dedicates to finding a solution.

BEAT 16, the hero Reacts to the Consequences of the Reversal.

BEAT 17, the hero faces Trials or conflict and must Act to overcome them.

BEAT 18, after choosing to Take Action, the hero Dedicates themselves to the central conflict.

ACT 3 [RESOLUTION]

BLOCK 7: The hero faces defeat—the action rises—victory seems impossible.

BEAT 19, after overcoming more Trials or conflict, there is a Calm Before the Storm.

BEAT 20, a Plot Twist or Pinch from the antagonist makes the hero Take Action.

BEAT 21, that Action results in the hero’s Darkest Moment.

BLOCK 8: The hero finds the power to take action.

BEAT 22, the hero finds the Power Within to continue their journey.

BEAT 23, the hero decides yet again to Act, possibly Rallies the troops, overcomes one last Trial.

BEAT 24, is where plot lines Converge. All players come together, stories intersect.

BLOCK 9: The hero Takes Action one last time and the core conflict is Resolved.

BEAT 25, the Battle or struggle—the final obstacle the hero must overcome.

BEAT 26, the Climax, the payoff of the battle, the Point of the Story; the hero overcame or succumbed to the obstacle.

Does Mobius recognize that he's a Loki variant? He doesn't seem to.

Maybe he hasn't hyper-fixated on Loki variants yet.

I guess to make it the most devastating it could be, they had to make Mobius not know him at all.

My writing turned totally around in Jan 2022. I was editing my latest NaNoWriMo project, and decided to check out a resource I found on nanowrimo.org to help me. Basically, I wanted help to write a dynamite blurb, or tagline. When I create a new story, I use a LibreOffice template I created to put my title page, copyright page with a sentence describing what the story's about, TOC, and a dummy first paragraph with my first dummy paragraph heading.

I wanted to know how to write better taglines.

So I read the article above and the light bulb went on! Simple. Elegant. Plotting.

I had always been a pantser. Never planned any part of my stories, and I have about 650 of 'em, half not even to the first draft. Dedicated pantser. In my teen years, I hated English literature in 8th grade even though I knew I needed to know how to plot, but all the analysis of the books we read [and I enjoyed reading them] just made me feel like, 'I'm too stupid to learn all this.'

Now, I'm reading these 10 steps and had an epiphany!

So, I broke down Step 1 and made it into my worksheet for coming up with taglines.

Here's how I think about those 15 max words to get it done:

One Sentence Summary: Adj.+Noun+Verb+Obj [Worker] [Action] [Effect] in 15 words or less Character With Most To Lose: What They Want:

So, for Adia, Scientist, here's what I came up with:

Discouraged scientist must discover a new fuel so her colony can escape from war.

I write science fiction and I loved chemistry in college, so, hey, I like formulas. I don't want my writing to sound like it came from a formula, but if you look at a lot of genres, there is one.

If you read enough romances, like my sister did, you figure out there's a pattern you can follow as a writer. I was there when she did. She went on to become famous and actually got an award presented to her in New York from her idol, Barbara Cartland at a writer's conference.

I--uh, I'm the non-famous sister who self-publishes on Amazon. But I enjoy my writing life, and though I do love to put romance in my books, romance writing is not my thing.

However, if you're like me and you want to improve your writing, Snowflake Method does work for a lot of us. And, if you buy one of Randy Ingermanson's very entertaining books, you get a free copy of his Snowflake Pro software, which walks you through each step and lets you see what you wrote in the previous step.

I don't do all 10 steps. Let's face it, I'm a plantser now. I'm not that meticuolous and organized. But, I do most of them, because Steps 1-5 give me a nice head start. And, Steps 3, 5 and 7 concentrate on your characters. Characters make your story. If you don't have a character that grabs your reader from the first chapter, why will they want to read your story? You have to have someone to care about and they have to have something happening that attracts the reader.

Now that I had a loose framework for my stories, I needed to [finally] learn something about plot structure more than the beginning, 3 disasters, and an ending. Randy does an excellent job of simplifying 3 act structure [though there are other methods such as PlotDot or Save The Cat that also work with Snowflake Method].

Another resource I found while exploring resources in the Now What? Revision pages on nanowrimo.org was K. M. Weiland's wonderful site:

This lady puts 3 act structure into terms that I can understand, and she has a vast database of books and movies that she's analyzed for us. If you think 3 act structure is complicated and boring, try reading a little of your favorite on this list:

I love the Marvel movies, so here's how she summarized The Avengers.

And she even mentions how what works in this movie would not, in a book. This is something I read time and time again about science fiction writing. Science fiction movies are not 'true' science fiction, for the most part. Star Wars is fantasy set on other planets. Star Trek has science in it, but again, is science fantasy.

In science fiction, science drives the story more than characters or plot. Though, to make my science fiction more accessible to a wider audience, I choose to concentrate on psychology, particularly interpersonal relationships. I do make sure that my science is feasible and believable, and explain it simply. And, I do my research.

So, when writing a book, it's good to see analyses like this of movies, but remember, it's different for books.

A friend who was also a producer told me, for a two-hour movie, you have to choose about two chapters for your script. The director has to insert some points to connect the dots. That's why many movies 'aren't like the book' they're based upon. It's an art to take a book and condense it like that so it still makes sense and absorbs the viewer.

We all know I am a huge plotter – like excel spreadsheet level – but I wasn’t always like this. I’ve used many methods in the past and here are the best ones:

The Big Plot Points 

In this method, you simply write out the big points like the catalyst, the midpoint, the climax and any big plot twists in your story. This helps you keep in mind the focus of your story as you write it, without actually plotting. 

Baby Steps 

More detailed than the Big Plot Points, Baby Steps involves writing all the little plot points down in chronological order. Think of it like a list of directions that get you from the first page to the end of the story. You can stray from the path, but this helps you know exactly where you’re going and what you want to achieve along the way. 

Next 10 Steps 

This is one I used a lot when writing fanfic in conjunction with the Big Plot Points. Here I would literally plan out the next 10 things that I wanted to happen in the story and treat it as a mini arc. If I’d known more about story structure, I could have done this 4 times and ended up with 4 acts (1, 2a, 2b, and 3). Instead, I did it 6 times and ending up with 170k words... don’t be me.

Save the Cat! Beat Sheet

An industry classic, the 15 beats of Save the Cat! can help you outline all the key moments that shape a story without interfering with panster discovery fun. This method breaks each of the 4 acts mentioned above into bite sized chunks to ensure that all elements of a compelling story are there. I would highly recommend the book Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody if you want to learn more about this essential method.  

Enjoy Editing 

Finally if outlining is not for you, you’ll need to become well acquainted with editing. All drafts take editing, but many pansters will spend more time on this stage than plotters, but then plotters spend more time plotting! There’s nothing wrong with being a complete panster, but it’s worth keeping in mind if you wish to forgo the plotting stage entirely.

As always, hoped this helped! 

Wackus I swear with one measly tag you have struck fear into my tender reader heart 😨

I mean we all knew it was coming but I’m not ready

hehe >:) this goes back to the 3 act structure I was supposed to do but didn't

basically i took the same beats from the snyder structure and stretched them into 5 acts. instead of the dark night of the soul beginning act 3, it will end act 4.

Hi Anon,

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you're coming from my post on outlining and you're referring to this picture:

I cannot share that file because it's the actual outline for Storge and that includes spoilers and old un-redacted content, so I don't really want it to be out on the internet, plus, google drive doesn't play nice with outline formatting in Word.

HOWEVER

I made up a quick "dummy doc" in gdrive, with the headings set up. I prefer Word for this because you can collapse the higher headings and that makes it a lot easier to navigate, but this accomplishes essentially the same thing. I didn't fill out the whole thing because I've got a midterm to study for tomorrow, so I'll leave that to you.

If you weren't asking for the structure, and you wanted a more in-depth analysis of what the 3-act structure is and how to write a story in that structure, I'm afraid I don't have a blog post up or time to do that today. This is the diagram I usually reference: My color coded notes assume you already know what needs to go in each chapter and just organize the different aspects that go into telling a story, rather than explaining what plot points correspond to each checkpoint, if that makes sense?

(grabbed from google idk who originally made it)

Please note there are about 1656845165498 different story structures out there and the 3-act model is only one of them that happened to work for Storge (hence my example), so if this doesn't look like it matches the story you want to tell, go look up others and adjust the doc accordingly. (The Hero's Journey is another popular one, which is what I used for Runaways).

Mind the disclaimers at the top, you have editing privileges so you can copy/paste and make a version for your own use, but don't mess it up for other people.

hi!

so, this is kind of vague, because "how to plan a book" is actually a LOT of elements. Characters, plot, themes, dynamics, arcs, etc. but i have some posts and articles that, generally, should help:

there's this one about *my* planning process. warning, it's long as fuck. i'm a huge plotter. Obviously you don't need to copy my exact process, but there's probably some tips in there that could help. (I go over planning character creation, personalities, character dynamics, storylines, backstory, and plot.)

there's also this over-enthusiastic post about 5 different "plotting levels" that i made up, which is shorter and more about specifically planning your plot.

if you're looking for planning methods, i recommend looking at the three-act structure, save the cat (which is similar), and the snowflake method. they're all very popular! funnily enough, i actually despise using all three of them, but they help a lot of people (especially those who aren't as extreme as i am when it comes to planning).