I was wary of books about story-structure for a long time, because they all seemed to be written by script-writers, not novelists - and novelists are not in the business of writing a skeleton to help a group of actors flesh out their characters-in-action well enough to keep the audience sitting down in the dark for a couple of hours. We are in the business of story-telling. I only understood why thinking in acts is so useful to a writer when I encountered John Yorke's Into the Woods, and was encouraged by the fact that Yorke started in TV: a TV series, like a novel, is a multi-sitting experience. You need a lot more story-material than a film does and, crucially, you don't just have to keep your audience once, you have to keep bringing them back.
1) You are already thinking in acts as soon as you're thinking about what happens to your characters in your story. Beginning, Middle and End is the fundamental experience of human life, so when we're imagining stories, we can't help shaping them that way too, with the twist that our equally human drive to make sense of things drives us to tell stories in terms of cause-and-effect
2) You don't have to think in acts to write a strong story with a compelling narrative drive, but thinking in acts can help you get to grips with how to build the chain of cause-and-effect, and how to keep the reader reading. What is different at the end, from how things were at the beginning? How did what went on in the middle get us there?
3) The midpoint is crucial in almost every one of different writers' attempts to lay out the structural fundamentals of the great stories told in past and present. Yorke actually prints a table of what he freely admits is "a gross simplification" of some of the major books, to make the point that all of them are just different ways of trying to get a handle on "the true shape of story".
4) Three Act Structure leaves the novelist with very little help in preventing that looooonnnnng Middle from sagging. In a film it might be an hour's watching, but in a book it might be many hours' reading. My breakthrough was realising that five acts works for me, because it divides the Middle up into three. My crime writer friend C S Green, on the other hand, works in four acts, with the Midpoint a single scene "holding everything else up like a tentpole".
5) Act structure is fractal. If the novel is your story, each act also needs its own beginning-middle(s)-end structure. You could each of those units chapters, if you liked, and if each chapter has a beginning-middle-end you could call each unit a scene. A scene, too, has a beginning-middle-end. Indeed, if you get feedback that a page or a paragraph is rather stodgy or rambly, look at its structure: does it, too, lead onwards? How are things different by the end?
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