Classic Plot Structure (3-Act Structure)

One of the cool things about the software we use to track visitor statistics for the Literary Lab is the ability to see what search terms were used to lead visitors here. A lot of people find us by entering "classic plot structure" into Google or whatever search engine. While Davin has written a post about the classic plot structure that you should by all means go read, it's more a commentary than a definition, so I'd like to take a few minutes and talk about the basics of the classic plot structure, which I'll henceforth refer to as the Three-Act Structure.

In brief, the Three-Act Structure is a framework to arrange story elements into a narrative, with pacing and major plot points as goals, a template into which you can pour your characters and events to give it shape. Narratives are constructed in three consecutive sections, or acts. The author has a distinct job to do in each of the three acts. The basic formula is:

Act One
Exposition, set-up, inciting incident. Hero is given a goal.

Act Two
The middle. The hero tries and fails to achieve goal.

Act Three
The climax and resolution. Hero makes last attempt to achieve goal and succeeds at last or fails forever.

(These are really sweeping generalizations, I know. But I didn't invent the classic plot structure, I just report on it.)

More detail:

In Act One, we see the hero (a word I use because it's shorter than "protagonist" and I'm less likely to misspell it) in his daily life, whatever and wherever that is. The hero has some internal need, usually, that can't be met in his daily life. Then, something happens to knock the hero off the rails of his daily life. He's been given a problem or a quest. Act One ends when the hero decides to solve the problem or take up the quest. The author's job in Act One is to establish the crisis in the hero's life that the hero must solve. There are lots of tasks involved in doing this job.

In Act Two, the hero struggles to solve the problem or complete the quest. He appears to be having success, though it doesn't come easy. The antagonist/villain fights against him indirectly. At the end of Act Two, the hero, who has been successful all this time, suffers a major defeat at the hands of the antagonist. Usually this defeat is caused by the hero's internal need which he has yet to deal with. This is the hero's lowest point, morally/physically/spiritually. All seems lost.

Lots of times, Act Two actually consists of the hero solving the problem that came up at the end of Act One, only to discover that it wasn't his real problem at all, and that he's got bigger fish to fry, which frying takes place in Act Three at the climax. The author's job in Act Two is to keep the action and the conflict rising toward the climax, and to show the hero attempting to re-establish equilibrium in his world (that is, achieve his goal). Lots of tasks involved in this job, too.

In Act Three, the hero bucks up and decides that he can go on, usually with greater resolve because yes, he's solved his inner problem that was holding him back. Or, he's realized he has this inner problem and is going to confront that. Either way, off he goes to fight the big fight at the Climax, after which there is a short denoument. The fight, of course, can be internal or metaphorical. Or fought with laser cannons; it's up to you. Your job, as author, is to resolve the crisis one way or another (or show how it cannot be resolved) in a manner that is believable within the rules of the story. The climax must seem both surprising and inevitable (except for those stories where you see it coming the whole time and hope the hero will avoid it). Again, lots of tasks are necessary to do this job.

So you have rising action, rising conflict, the possibility of total defeat and then even more action and conflict and then climax. Sometimes the hero dies or is otherwise defeated at the climax. Anyway, that's your classic Three-Act Structure in a nutshell. It gets more complicated as you layer on subplots and themes and other story elements, but you get the idea.

Another way of thinking about the Three-Act Structure is in terms of Action/Reaction/Results. Or perhaps as Problem/False Solution/True Solution. Or Crisis/Loss of Identity/Rebirth. Or At Home/This Is Not My Beautiful House/This Is My New House. Really, the different stories you can tell in this three-part structure are endless.

Now, is the Three-Act Structure of any use to a writer? I think very loosely in these terms when I do my outlining before I've begun actually writing. I also have begun lately thinking in terms of the Action/Reaction/Results 3-part structure when writing chapters and scenes, which gives a nice feeling of controlled flow to the writing. But I do think it's easy to fall into the trap of writing to a formula, which generally results in stories that are predictable, melodramatic, and otherwise suck.

The idea of the Three-Act Structure grew out of Aristotle's basic structure (which interested parties can read about in his Poetics):

Beginning, Middle, End

But Greek plays had only one act and don't divide nicely into the Three-Act template. Roman plays had five acts (as did the plays of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans), but that was to allow for intermissions and snack breaks. Ancient plays were longer than our two-hour movies so there were practical matters to which playwrights and theaters had to attend.

What I think is as useful for a story template as the Three-Act Structure is to divide the story into two types of action: the action that creates the problem, and the action that resolves the problem. This is how real conflict works in real life. You might try writing down the action that creates the problem and then the action that resolves it, and then break those actions down into scenes and see what you've got.

So while the Three-Act Structure might be a helpful organizing tool, I caution anyone against tying themselves too tightly to it. Stories are about who we are and how we solve problems, and I suggest we think in those terms and not so much in terms of "I haven't raised the stakes for my protagonist" or "I need to use my antagonist's minions in this act."

Beginning, middle and end. Start with the end, if you know enough about your story to know who your characters are. Who is he at the end of the story? Then tell us how and why he got there. That is what you are telling us. That is a story.

Gateway Books: Your First One's Free

With Christmas coming, I think about giving books as gifts to my friends and family. I want to support the art form that is so important to me, and I always have secret hopes of getting the world more excited about reading again. But, as I've mentioned before, a lot of my friends don't read that much. Sometimes, giving them a book is equivalent to giving them a brick.

I've gotten better at the whole process though. When I first started doing it, my approach was wrong. If I loved a book, I'd buy multiple copies of it and give it to my friends. As a result, a lot of people got Anna Karenina--and I lot of people got bored by Anna Karenina.

I realized that if I wanted people to read, I had to give them what they wanted in a book. I had to be in tune with their needs.

One of the ways of doing this is to rely on what I call "gateway" books. Like a gateway drug, (and a gateway drug dealer) I try to use books I already know people like to get them hooked on new things. Like Twilight? Try Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson. Like Joy Luck Club? Try Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, or Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. In this way, I try to let people know that there are other books out there besides the three that they see in the center of every display window.

I also look at their lives. My brother isn't a big reader. He brags about how he got through high school without actually finishing a single novel. In my mind, it was a waste to buy him a book. But, when he had his son, I decided to buy him a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, since it describes a journey of father and son..and it's short. Not only did he finish it, but he read most of it with his son in his arms and wrote me to tell me how moved he was when he finished.

So here are some of my tips when I buy someone a book:

1. Find out about their usual reading habits. Do they read at all? If so, what?

2a. If they don't read at all, find out what types of movies they like. If they do read, find out what they read.

3. Ask them WHY they like the stories they like. Is it the romance of Twilight or the humor? Do they like only vampire stories, or any type of fantasy? A few of my friends mentioned loving the movie No Country For Old Men...up until the end. That's important to know because the end basically establishes that the story is a literary work, rather than an action adventure.

4. Research. If we want to be able to recommend books, it means we have to be familiar with a broad range of them ourselves. I can't spend my life reading Tolstoy--I have to know what else is out there. I have to make my way through books I wouldn't normally read to understand what about them is so engaging.

5. Give them the book and tell them why you think they'll like it. If there are weak parts to the book, maybe tell them about it before hand so that they don't give up too early. Basically, give them a little bit of instruction. But, only a little!

6. Find out how you did. Did they like the book or hate it? If they liked it, tell them about other books they might like. Try your best to broaden their horizons. If they hated it, find out why they hated it. Recommend a different type of book that might fit their personalities better.

For me, the ultimate goal is to get people to be more open-minded about what's out there. With the current model of marketing, many books get so little coverage that they don't reach their appropriate audience. I think if we help them out, it will eventually help give us more chances to publish what we want to write.

So, tell me about your success stories! Have you recommended books to people that they loved? Do you go out of your way to get more people to read?

The Fictional Dream

Writer and teacher John Gardner had a concept he called the fictional dream, which was the idea that fiction does its job by creating a dream state for the reader, and as long as the writer is doing a good job of maintaining that dream state, the reader won't "wake up" from it and will continue to read and believe in the fictional world the writer has created. Gardner argues that this fictional dream first happens in the writer's head, and the writer's job is to write it down for the reader:

“In the writing state—the state of inspiration—the fictive dream springs up fully alive: the writer forgets the words he has written on the page and sees, instead, his characters moving around their rooms, hunting through cupboards, glancing irritably through their mail, setting mousetraps, loading pistols. The dream is as alive and compelling as one’s dreams at night, and when the writer writes down on paper what he has imagined, the words, however inadequate, do not distract his mind from the fictive dream but provide him with a fix on it, so that when the dream flags he can reread what he’s written and find the dream starting up again. This and nothing else is the desperately sought and tragically fragile writer’s process: in his imagination, he sees made-up people doing things—sees them clearly—and in the act of wondering what they will do next he sees what they will do next, and all this he writes down in the best, most accurate words he can find, understanding even as he writes that he may have to find better words later, and that a change in the words may mean a sharpening or deepening of the vision, the fictive dream or vision becoming more and more lucid, until reality, by comparison, seems cold, tedious, and dead.”

For me, at least, this is a pretty accurate description of what writing is like, at least some of the time. As I work my way through the second act of "Cocke & Bull" I am finding that even though I've got a couple of outlines written for the book and I'm accumulating notes to myself about what the second act is all about, the tool upon which I am leaning the most to get the writing done is my imagination. Last night I was trying to write a simple scene in which three people camp out for the night in a pine forest, and when I imagined the scene I found myself imagining all sorts of surprising action and then I found myself describing this action in all sorts of surprising ways. I read back over what I wrote and at one point had to ask myself where a certain symbolic image came from; I didn't remember writing it at all but there it was on the page and it was perfect.

All of which should give me confidence as I move forward through the middle section of the book, but still I feel like I'm taking a white-knuckle ride through the story, because even though I know certain things that have to happen by the end of the second act, in some ways I have no idea at all what's going to happen during the course of this act and I'm still feeling my way blindly through the story even with my pages of notes and outlines and maps and charts (yes, charts). I breathe a sigh of relief at the completion of each chapter, as if I've survived some harrowing experience. Which, you know, I have.

Genre Wars Contest Ending Thoughts

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in our Genre Wars contest, either by entering your work, by spreading the word, or simply by not calling us names when you heard about it.

We closed our submissions late Tuesday night, ending with far more entries than we had anticipated. (I was personally hoping for 50 pieces, and we got a lot more than 50.) Michelle, Scott, and I are now in the process of reading and reviewing each story. All three of us have our own ranking scales, and--though we agree on some great stories--there are plenty that we will have to debate and discuss when we're done. I think we're all excited about that and hope that we don't resort to cannibalism as a way of making our case.

As you all know, the submissions process was kept anonymous to the three of us. All emails sent to our joined address was only opened by our very dedicated and selfless helper, Becca Brown--thank you so much, Becca! Occasionally she forwarded some non-contest-related messages to us, but everything else was kept secret. Only after our decision process is over will we allow ourselves to see the names of the authors, and we're still not sure if we will look at writers of the stories we don't accept.

Do you all have opinions on that?

Next, we're going to finish all of our work and put together the anthology. Winners from each genre will be announced on January 7th, and the "best of show" winner will be announced as well. Each of these stories will be in the anthology, and we'll also post them up on our blog, along with interviews of the writers. Additionally, several other stories will be selected for the anthology. And, of course our little prizes.

When we sell the anthology (as a POD publication) all of the proceeds will be donated to one of the charity groups we feature here--we're not done with that part of things yet. The charity group will be voted on by readers.

And, since the three of us have been debating on what to do about the cover of the anthology, we thought we'd invite anyone who is interested to submit a cover idea. So, spread the word to your artist friends! We'll also be coming up with some ideas of our own, hopefully. That's right, it's a contest for a contest. But a far less organized one.

Send your entries as a .jpg attachment to LiteraryLab (at) gmail (dot) com by December 21st 12:00 p.m. PST. All artwork must be original and you must be the copyright holder in order for us to use your cover art!

Don't Try To Be The Fattest Giraffe

We all have our strengths and weaknesses. Someone might be great at dialog and not so great at description. Or, someone might be great at description and not so great at structure. The obvious approach as we try to become better writers is to strengthen our weaknesses. I, for example, didn't like how I was handling structure, so I've been researching standard structures, mainly from reading screenwriting books. But, then, I started thinking about voice and what makes voice unique. What if part of what made my voice unique was the fact that my story structures were odd?

A giraffe is a cool animal, not because it is skinnier than an elephant. A giraffe is cool because it's got a super-long neck and an amazing heart that allows it to pump blood up that neck. If I were to be impressed by a giraffe, it would be because it was really tall, not really fat. In fact, I'd probably be less impressed by a fat giraffe. An elephant, on the other hand, is cool partly because it is so fat. That's why we're impressed when it can stand up on its hind legs, or balance on a ball. In other words, each of these animals is cool because of its unique characteristics, and if all animals developed features that made them equally good at everything, they would end up being less interesting as a whole, some featureless brown blob like a cardboard box with fangs.

Though I'm NOT saying that we should wallow in our weaknesses, I think a valid approach to creating unique work is to exploit our strengths to compensate for our weaknesses. Someone who is bad at dialog could write a brilliant book that contains no dialog. Someone who is bad at description could write "Hills Like White Elephants." (Yes, that's a joke.)

With this mindset, a good book can be represented by a pie chart. Some good books will have very even pie slices, where each slice represents a component of writing such as description, character, dialog, pacing, transitions, emotion, intensity etc. Other good books might have only three really big slices--character, emotion, and intensity. That doesn't necessarily mean that it is a less impressive book. It just means it has the potential to be unique.

Is this crazy? Am I wrong? Do you have weaknesses that might actually allow you to write a more unique book?

AND, we wanted to mention that writer Roz Morris is giving away FREE copies of the pdf of her book, Nail Your Novel. We checked it out and think it's a solid resource for beginning writers. Check it out!

DOUBLE AND, Tess Hilmo sold her novel, With A Name Like Love!!!!!!!

Transitions

Fia left this in our 'Have a Question?' box: A few years ago my tutor said my writing read too like a script. I decided to 'tell' more. Now I have the poor protagonist not only waking up but going to the bathroom, brushing her hair, getting in the car...help!

If I understand Fia properly (given that she gave her question the title "Transitions"), the problem she's having is with moving from one scene to another and spanning the time between those scenes without filling in the "story time" with meaningless action. I would first like to point back to this post I did in July about time passing in novels, and then (without bothering myself to read that old post) prolix on a bit here about transitions. I may contradict something I said back in July, in which case, what I say now is right. Unless it's not. Onward:

How do you go from one scene to the next? How much "real-time" activity of a character can you skip?

The first thing you need to know in order to work this out, is which of your scenes are actually necessary. Every scene should move the story (which means either plot or character development) forward. If you have scenes that don't do this, I suggest very strongly that you cut them. No matter what your writing coach might say.

Once your story is made of only necessary scenes (and passages of necessary exposition and narrative summary), you have to come up with the connective tissue that holds them together. But before we work on our transitions, let's put in mind a couple of good rules for effective scenes:

1. "In late, out early": This is an idea used often by screen writers, and it means that you begin your scenes only when something important is about to happen. You don't waste a lot of time setting up the scene or building up to the action. And, once whatever important event has taken place, you don't hang around afterwards as the staff clears off the tables. You get out and move on.

This doesn't mean that scenes should be short, all action and the pace of the novel rushed. This doesn't mean that you can't use the "scene and sequel" technique where after something important happens, your characters think about what that event means to them as people. What it means is that you don't waste your reader's time and that the story never reaches stall speed; you keep moving forward at all times.

2. Scenes are self-contained: This means that the work of setting the scene, describing the surroundings, etc, is all done in the scene itself, and is not done using expository passages that seem to go nowhere. This is a separate set of subjects all unto themselves, so I won't dwell on it here.

Once you have your scenes in well-written form, there are a couple of ways to connect them:

1. Just do it(tm): Jump directly from one scene to another, possibly at a scene break or chapter break.

2. Cut back-and-forth: Switch between characters/locales/events, and each time you return to a character, you've moved the timeline forward or changed the location of the character. You sort of leap-frog your separate storylines (you do have more than one storyline, don't you?).

3. Find the connecting idea: If your story is solidly-built, there is something (an object or an idea or an emotion) that is carried forward from one scene to the next. The reason you have the following scenes, in other words. Think about that reason and how it connects the two scenes, and use it as your transition. I know that I talked about this in the post back in June.

4. "Two hours later...": Just tell your reader that you've moved on with the story, skipping unimportant stuff. Anyone who's read more than, say, two novels will be used to this narrative device, and there's nothing wrong with it. Most of the time, the simplist way to do something is the most effective, least obtrusive, and therefore bestest of all possible ways to do it. The more you try to be fancy, the higher the risk that you'll fail. Do please take risks with your writing, but be prepared to fall on your face some of the time and resort to Plain Old Writing That Works.

The main thing to keep in mind here is that, whenever you find your characters doing things that have nothing to do with the story, you should just cut that stuff. If you can't find a clever or beautiful way of moving the storyline forward to the next scene, try doing it in the most simple and direct manner possible (either a scene break, a chapter break, or declaring to the reader that you've jumped ahead in time).

One of my favorite transitional passages in my work-in-progress is this little bit, that bridges two similar scenes that are set in different places and entail different characters; there is nothing to immediately connect these scenes, so I just pick the reader up and carry them from the first scene to the second:

About six miles south of Abigail’s farm, on a hill that rose above the town of Joppa, Clockshott sat alone in his parlor, waiting for Bull. It was not yet eight o’clock and Clockshott’s hands busied themselves buttoning and unbuttoning the green waistcoat he wore. He was not confident that his guest would come at all.

What I like about this transition is that it's not really a passage between scenes; it is in fact the start of the next scene. Which leads me to one final thought about transitions: don't make them a place of rest, a spot where the story slows down. Think of transitions as the start of something new, not the end of what just happened or a space between things. Always consider how you can maintain forward momentum.

As usual, the best way to learn how this stuff is done well is to read your favorite authors and pay attention to the way they handle these things. Every writer develops favorite techniques for solving these narrative problems, and while we seem to be forced into coming up with solutions individually, there are really only a few ways to do this.

IMPORTANT NOTICE! The Genre Wars short story contest (details here) ends TONIGHT at 11:59 PM PST! There is still time to submit your 2,000-word (or fewer words, if you like) story! Don't delay! Ignore your boss and polish up that prose!

Where do you submit your work?

In our "Just Ask" section, Sharon Mayhew asked us where she could submit individual "deep" poems.

Sharon, there are actually dozens and dozens of fine literary magazines that publish poetry. Some of the more popular ones would include The New Yorker and The Paris Review, among others. Not only would places like this give you great exposure, but they are also going to pay you some money to publish your work.

But, not everyone gets into publications such as this. It takes talent, luck, and probably some strong connections would help as well. If you think your work is good, I'd say give it a shot, but don't get your hopes up too high.

If you go to a website called Duotrope's Digest, you can also use their poetry search engine to find other publications you can submit to. Go to the site, click the tab that says "poetry," fill in the search criteria, and then click "search." You'll get the names of the publications, the genres they publish, length requirements, pay scales, and whether they are a print or electronic publication. It's a great resource, and you can use it for free, although they appreciate donations.

Getting into a literary magazine is a bit of an art. (This applies to everyone, not just poets.) Different publications have different preferences. So, you can submit often to many different publications in the hopes that you'll accidentally stumble on a good fit. Or, you can take the time to research the pubs and only submit to the ones that seem to like your type of work. Seriously, either way works. I tend to take the latter approach, but I know a poet who takes the former and has quite a bit of success. You can decide if you want to spend your time research or submitting--both are kind of tedious, at least to me.

When you find a publication you are interested in, go to their submission guidelines. They will tell you how to submit your work to them. Often with poetry you can submit multiple pieces at the same time if you have them.

There are a few other things you should know about submitting, including the value of online versus print publications, multiple submissions versus simultaneous submissions, and the cover letter. Check out a few of our other posts, to get more information (1, 2, 3)

For me, the key to submitting is to expect failure. That may be a bit depressing, but getting an editor or agent to like your work depends on so many factors that are out of your control. If someone turns you down, don't necessarily blame yourself. Yes, sometimes, your work might not hold up. But, sometimes, the editor could have just gotten a parking ticket and simply isn't in the mood to make anyone happy that day.