The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.-- Flannery O’Connor

Story Structure: Three Acts

Today we build off your work over the previous four exercises. We are looking for your story arc and will start with a broad stroke of organizing your story into three acts (or the beginning, middle, and end.) This will likely be frustrating! We are moving you from a narration of life events into a prescribed story structure. 

As you do this exercise, you may discover you want to change where you begin or end your story (eg., “oh wait, I need to start this story when I left home, not when I met Mark,” or, “I realize now this story doesn’t really end until I moved to Colorado...”). Pay attention to how the story is revealed to you and make changes as they feel necessary, but know that things will likely move around a bit for a while.

Now, for the exercise! Each act has its own function. Grab three pieces of paper and use one piece of paper for each act. Using the questions below, review what you wrote over the last few exercises and see how you can move that content into this form. This is your first effort at this, so it doesn’t need to be perfect!

For now, please ignore:

• Questions about where your final draft will actually start. (You may ultimately choose to start in the middle or write in flashbacks, but that is an editorial decision for later edits. We will organize it in linear time for now!)
• Questions about how you are going to ‘hook’ your reader (again, this is an exercise for later editing)
• Working on any character development or depth (very bad writing is still fine here)
• Any events in the first act (unless something comes up that is easy and obvious.)

If this takes more than a day’s work for you, please take an extra day if you need it. The next exercise will build off of this exercise. (Oh, and find your index cards. You need them for the next exercise!)

Great work!

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water. -- Amy Tan