You have trust in what you think. If you splinter yourself and try to please everyone, you can’t. -- Annie Leibovitz

Keep Writing: Three Acts of Scenes

Today will continue to use the index scene cards to organize your story. We are going to put each of your scenes into one of your three acts. A few notes to guide you:

• Stories have THREE acts.
• Act II is usually about HALF of your word count.
• Acts I and II are the other half of your word count (usually about evenly split).

If you are starting to get a sense of how many scenes you have, use the guide below to give you a sense of how long your story will be. (Use this as a rough guide, not an absolute mandate!)

Review this chart to get a general sense of how many index cards/scenes are needed in each act for different lengths of stories.

Remember, each of these cards represents one scene in your story - very roughly about 1,500 words each. (Some will be 500, some will be 3,000, but this helps you roughly estimate your projected word count.)

Continue to PLAY with this. Organize the cards you wrote out yesterday into acts. Add new scene cards (even if blank) where you think you need more. Remove old ones you written if you don't see how they fit. 

This is a messy process! Life stories simply are not as neat and tidy as we wish they were. Frustration is expected here as you try to guide a narration of events into a plot structure.

Take this as far as you can take it. Having too many or too few (eg., blank) cards in each area is normal and fine right now.

You can do this!

Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure. -- Natalie Goldberg