Last year I read Story
Engineering by Larry Brooks. Brooks spoke about the classic three-act structure
in fiction.
The three-act structure is easy to understand. The mistake most people make is thinking that this limits you to three acts, or scenes in your novel. Who ever heard of a novel with three scenes?
Nothing close to it. What it does require you to do is look at the novel in three parts.
Then yesterday a friend gave me The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray. Ray introduces Aristotle’s Incline. This is a great way of looking at the three-act structure.
Aristotle's Incline
Act I—This is the setup. You introduce the hero or the
protagonist, and you introduce the villain. You outline the main challenge
facing the hero. There is lots of conflict. Act I ends with a defining moment:
the hero realizes nothing is ever going to be the same. (NOTE: Actually, the
idea that nothing is ever going to be the same should have started much sooner,
but by the first plot point the hero should realize that not only is it never
going to be the same, but he is going to have a hard time defining the new
order, or even if he is going to survive and be part of it.) The first plot
point can be an event, or a series of events, but at the conclusion, the reader
should know that something BIG has occurred.
Act II—This is the hero’s journey. It is divided into two parts. In the first part the hero is trying to figure out what is happening. There is a lot of stuff up in the air, a lot of questions. It is not uncommon for the hero to be lost. At the middle of Act II, and coincidentally at the middle of your novel, there is a turning point. Something happens that sheds light on the hero’s plight. Whether the hero will survive is still a question, but there is a realization, an event, or a decision to move forward and confront the conflict. The hero does not even know the way out, just the general direction.
For the rest of Act II things begin to solidify. Big questions remain, but the hero is getting smarter and more aware. He might even have a setback or two. At the end of Act II comes plot point two. This is the big break-through. Something happens that forces the action. The smoking gun is found, the boy’s father identified, the map to the hidden treasure is deciphered.
Act III—The third act is the unwinding. The hero becomes increasingly aware of what is happening and what they have to do. Again, they may stumble around, but things are becoming clearer. The plot continues evolving into the final resolution.
The key to a good novel is basing your action on this three-act structure. Most great novels are in some way based on it. Aristotle developed it and we have been copying it ever since. The key to a really good novel is figuring out an ingenious way to wrap your novel around this format.
If you have never heard of the three-act structure, or Aristotle’s Incline, you might have lots of questions, and probably some objections. I suggest you read Story Engineering. Then, if you are like me, you go back and figure out how to change your novel so that it conforms to this format.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Image from After Lysippos [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.
Diagram of Aristotle’s Incline based on The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray.
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