Do you know what the 3-act structure is? (Used more in the filmmaking industry.) If so, do you consciously apply it to your writing? If not, why not? If so, how has it worked for you?

Just some questions to get a conversation started.

Hmmm. I've never heard of the 3-Act structure. Enlighten me please?

Is the 3 act structure the one which Christopher Vogler proposes that has twelve mini-acts which are organized under the 3 acts, which I'll term 'The Beginning' (running until the protag accepts the journey), 'The Middle' (running until the final confrontation is set up), and 'The End'? If not, I also don't know what the structure is.

I own a film-making business so I know what it is ... probably the best way to write too!

Since Filmmaking is my primary creative goal I usually look at my stories with three act structure in mind because it is the most familiar to me and also universally accepted as how stories are told. The beginning, the middle, and the end.

To my knowledge that's what it is. But I've heard it further broken down into rough length of segments (or chapters): 1/4 of the chapters are in Act 1, the middle half of the book is Act 2, and the last 1/4 is Act 3.

By what I've read, both of you are right. So yes, let the conversation continue.

A few more questions for continuing the discussion:

#1
The three act structure is obviously not just a name for the first quarter, middle half, and last quarter of the book.
So, what is meant to distinguish these three acts in this structure? Or what are the most common ways of distinguishing these parts?

#2
Would any work of fiction benefit from this structure?

#3
Would it actually harm some works of fiction?

#4
How would you tell if it was right to apply to your story?

#5
With some things it may work because applying any kind of structure would benefit. How do we know that it is this particular structure that would benefit the story more than a different structure?

I don't think I've seen anyone say this before, and it's worth noting: The "three-act structure" defined in this way is an idea from film, where it was "created" to describe a lot of films before it was ever used to design films. (The idea of dividing a work into "acts" goes back to staged drama from Shakespeare's day and earlier, of course, but the purely-dramatic notion doesn't necessarily involve any ideas about the relative length of the acts.)


In books that fit this structure, there's some major plot-changing event at the break between the first and second acts, and another at the break between the second and third acts ... and those events, and the discontinuity at each of them between what was going on before and what was going on afterwards, are what makes a story a "three-act story."


Pretty much any work of fiction benefits from having some structure designed into it (or at least having some thought put into its structure) from the beginning, but this structure works well for some stories and not so well for others, just like my skeleton wouldn't fit a cat very well.


Trying to shoehorn a story into a structure that doesn't fit it could harm it, yes.


The thing is, while in film the three-act structure is so conventional as to be nearly obligatory (from what I've read), in fiction it's not ... so (like "the hero's journey," another commonly-used critical model) it's mostly useful as a descriptive rather than a prescriptive model. If your story almost fits it, but not quite, and your readers (or your instincts) tell you that something's not quite right ... you might want to adjust the pacing slightly to correlate with this model more strongly. But if it doesn't describe your story very well, you'd probably be better off finding a model that's closer to the story you're already writing.


Look at the model and (the outline of) your story side-by-side, and see how well they line up.

What are some examples of alternatives to the 3-Act Structure?

The most obvious answer is no structure at all.

I've seen the 3-Act Structure referred to with four acts, the middle being divided in half to split the book into four roughly equal parts, with some disaster or drastic change marking the transition between the sections.

I've also read that you can use five acts, but I'm not familiar with any of the details.

There are four- and five-act structures (derived from theater directly, rather than via film). A story can be purely episodic (I think that's called a "picaresque novel," but I'm not sure).

But more directly comparable to the "three-act structure" of films, I think, is a structure that I never learned a name for, but that was taught as "the" structure for stories and novels when I was in school: introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement. (I'm probably forgetting some of the parts ... I should probably look this up again.)