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Organize Your Story In Three Acts

Storytellers have employed the three-act structure since its origins in ancient Greek drama, and Hollywood still uses it today as its standard. While it isn't the only way to successfully organize a story, it's a good place to start, particularly since studio executives pretty much expect it. And, once you have mastered the three-act structure, you'll be able to play with alternative structures much more convincingly.

The three-act structure is an organizational tool. Every good story has dramatic tension that happens at the right time and in the right places. Too little tension, and the story stalls. Too much tension, and you wind up overwhelming and confusing your audience. The three-act structure helps you map out the progression of tension from opening to inciting incident to climax and resolution in a coherent way.

Each of the acts has a specific job to do. You can think of it as setup, complications, and resolution. Or to put it another way, get your hero up a tree in the first act, throw progressively bigger rocks at him and force him further up the tree in the second, and let him climb down or shake him out of the tree in the third.

Let's take a closer look at the individual acts.

Setting the Tension: Act I

Act I sets the tension and gets the hero up the tree by establishing the characters, the story world, the story concept, and the conflict. We learn who the protagonist is and what he wants. We become familiar with his world before it gets disrupted, and we are encouraged to like him or feel sympathy toward him. We also learn where and when the story is taking place and are introduced to the rules of this story world.

An event must happen in Act I to disrupt our protagonist's life, eliciting action from him and setting the story in motion. This is the inciting incident, and it often occurs early in the first act. The first major twist or reversal in the story occurs at the end of Act I. The protagonist has experienced a major change in his life and has made an initial decision about how to react to this change. The conflict has been established.

The first act of Thelma and Louise (written by Callie Khouri) introduces us to the two protagonists and their normal world. Their goal at this point is a weekend away, a bit of an escape from the daily grind. For Louise (Susan Sarandon), it's a break from waitressing and an opportunity to get her mind off Jimmy, her non-committal boyfriend. For Thelma (Geena Davis), it's a chance to escape her domineering husband. When they stop at a bar for a few drinks, we experience their bond and their sense of humor, and we quickly get to like them. The inciting incident occurs when Louise shoots the man attempting to rape a drunken Thelma in the bar's parking lot, disrupting life as they knew it in a dramatic way. By then we're on their side, ready to follow their adventure.

Generally speaking, Act I covers the first 25-30 pages of the screenplay.

Building the Tension: Act II

Act II throws rocks at the hero by building the tension and deepening the conflict until the tension reaches a breaking point at the end of the act. The protagonist now has a goal—to get the girl, solve the mystery, save the world. If he achieves his goal without struggle, we have no story. So the writer throws obstacles in the hero's way and develops subplots to complicate his life. By the end of Act II, the hero has his goal in sight and thinks he has the solution. But then the major reversal at the end of Act II turns his solution on its head. The hero is forced to muster even more strength and determination or change his plan, often against a running clock.

In the second act of Thelma and Louise, the girls now have a different goal: to escape to Mexico. Their main obstacle becomes the law. Complications build. They need money. Louise refuses to go through Texas. The law is closing in on them. But finally Louise's boyfriend Jimmy shows up with some cash and it looks like they'll make it—until a hitchhiker Thelma picked up robs them at the Act II turning point.

Act II generally runs from page 25 or 30 to about page 90.

Accelerating And Then Releasing The Tension: Act III

Act III gets the hero out of the tree by accelerating the action. Now we're on a downhill ride as the hero makes a new plan and goes for broke. All the complications the screenwriter established during Acts I and II come together in Act III. At the climax, the hero will either land safely or he'll crash and burn. In the aftermath following the climax, the tension releases. Any threads that are still left hanging are resolved, and we catch a glimpse of the hero's future. We finally find out if he gets the girl, or if he lands in jail.

The third act of Thelma and Louise accelerates the action: Thelma robs a store; the girls blow up a semi; they refuse to turn themselves in even though the law is closing in on them. At the climax, a chase scene involving multiple cop cars ensues—and leaves the girls hanging on the edge of a cliff. In this film, climax and resolution happen almost simultaneously when the girls decide to go over the cliff rather than turn themselves in.

Act III covers the last 25 or 30 pages of the screenplay.

The overall movement in a three-act screenplay can be stated as first setting tension, then building it, and finally accelerating and releasing it.

The lengths of the acts as stated above (a ratio of 1:2:1) are flexible. In fact, it is often dramatically advisable to shorten Act III. Ideally, Act III should give the audience a sense of acceleration up to the final conflict and finish with a resolution that is short and sweet. An Act III that is too long will drag the story down.

The First 10 Pages

Take another look at the photo of Greg Beal of the Nicholl Fellowship surrounded by over 6,000 script submissions (http://photos.oscars.org/listanevent.php?events=50). Now imagine you're the reader sitting in the middle of that avalanche. How much patience do you have for a story that doesn't grab you right away? I'm betting not a lot.

"Readers are overworked," says producer Hal Croasmun. "Your job is to make it impossible for them to put your script down."

Hollywood's short attention span can be infuriating to writers who have poured their life's blood into their work. "Unfair!" they cry. "If a reader puts down the script after 10 pages, they'll miss the award-worthy love scene on page 53. And what about the fantastic twist at the end?" Unfortunately, by then it's too late.

It's the business of readers and producers to know what will hold their audience's interest. "I've asked over 25 producers, 'At what point in a script can you tell if it is written by a professional screenwriter?'" says Croasmun. "Many said, 'Within three pages,' and more than half said, 'On the first page.'"

Don't think the public will be more generous. Several years ago, famed editor Sol Stein conducted an informal study on book-browsing habits in mid-Manhattan bookstores. He found that most people read about three pages before either buying the book or putting it down to pick up another one. In his book On Writing, Stein says, "Thereafter, whenever a novelist told me that his novel really got going on page 10 or 20 or 30, I had to pass on the news that his book in all likelihood was doomed."

The first 10 pages need to introduce us to the story, the setting, and the characters. They need to establish the hero's "life as usual" and to show us the event that catapults the hero into a different life (inciting incident). By the end of the first 10 pages, we need to know what the story is about. All this needs to happen in a fresh and entertaining way. Many novice writers stop the story to establish the characters and the setting and to unroll "life as usual." But experienced writers reveal character and establish relationships and setting and get the story rolling by giving us conflict from the get-go, saturating every line of dialogue with meaning, having their characters interact with the setting, and creating intriguing story questions that pique curiosity. The best way to learn how to write great openings is by studying the first few pages of some of your favorite scripts.

When you grab your reader on the first page, you've just made a promise to tell him a great story. Live up to that promise on every page that follows, and your reader won't be able to put your script down.

The End: Inevitable And Surprising

The ending is the last thing an audience sees. If it's amazing, they'll remember the movie as a wonderful experience. If not, they'll leave the theater disappointed.

There are three kinds of endings. Happy endings, downer endings, and bittersweet endings.

Happy ending: Boy gets girl (You've Got Mail), justice triumphs (The Verdict), and everyone lives happily ever after. We leave the theater feeling good, our hearts full of hope for humanity and ourselves. Because audiences love happy endings, Hollywood loves happy endings.

Downer endings: Boy gets girl but he loses something even more valuable (Body Heat), evil has destroyed good (Chinatown). The world is a mess, and we leave the theater sobered. Sometimes hardship elucidates life, and there have always been successful movies with downer endings.

Bittersweet endings: Girl loses boy, but she wins something more valuable (My Best Friend's Wedding). Or good triumphs over evil, but only because the hero made a personal sacrifice (Casablanca).

Endings must resolve the story question in a clear and unambiguous way. If the question raised in Act I was, "Will the boy get the girl?" your Act III has to answer with a yes or a no. Not a maybe. Even in a bittersweet ending, the answer is either "yes, but" or "no, but."

The ending has to be set up step-by-step. It can't come out of left field. It should be hinted at throughout the film. It should feel inevitable, as if that's the only possible way this story could have ended. It should make sense. But at the same time, the ending needs to be surprising.

What? How can an ending be both inevitable and surprising?

Look at Thelma and Louise again. Everything in the story points to Thelma and Louise not being willing to give up their freedom. Their whole journey has been about escaping from society's constraints. Are they really going to allow themselves to go to jail? No! They have to get away! That's the inevitable part. But the way they choose to get away—by going over the cliff and facing their death on their own terms—that's the surprise.

Once you've written your ending, go back through Acts I and II and verify that every twist, event, and revelation in Act III is properly set up. This is what will make your ending seem inevitable, and therefore true to the story. It will feel right.

Anticipation

When my brother and I were little, my father used to tell us bedtime stories featuring Doctor Terrible, a villain of his own invention, and me and my brother as the heroes. Each night, my father would get us into an impossible predicament. There we were, trapped by Doctor Terrible and armed only with tennis rackets. We listened to my father's words, breathless with anticipation, eager to learn what ingenious plan we would hit upon.

And then it would happen. My dad would turn the light off and say, "To be continued tomorrow."

Mine was a sleep-deprived childhood, hanging out there on that cliff. All I could think about was WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT.

When you anticipate something, you look forward to it, like a special night out or a vacation, or you prepare for it, like a job interview or retirement. Anticipation propels you into the future, and the emotions about the upcoming event can range from hope and excitement to dread and worry. In real life, most of us find swinging back and forth between the two extremes too stressful. But at the movies, we find it exciting. We want to be kept on the edge of our seats hoping the hero will make it but worrying he won't. A gripping story uses anticipation to keep us hooked.

There are many ways to build anticipation into your story. One is the tactic my dad used—setting something up, and then delaying the payoff (see tip #34, Setups and Payoffs). Another is to hide information from the character but share it with the audience. One scene I saw recently did both of these to great effect. In the movie Babel (written by Guillermo Arriaga) we know that Cate Blanchett's character will be shot. We see the kids aim at the bus and pull the trigger. Then we go back in time a little and see Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt on the bus. She's sleeping, her head against the window. We KNOW the bullet will penetrate the window, and we wait for it to happen. But she continues to sleep peacefully, oblivious to the danger, as the bus rolls on. And rolls on. The moment of impact is delayed and you're left squirming in your seat with anticipation.

After you've written a scene, go back through it and see how you can create more anticipation. Where can you make us hope the character will achieve his goal, and where can you make us worry that he won't? How many different ways can you make us ask what will happen, if it will happen, and when will it happen? Build anticipation into your script and your reader won't be able to put it down.

Setups And Payoffs

Think of setup as a promise made and payofs as a promise fulfilled. When you set something up, you create an expectation in the reader that it'll be paid off later. In Thelma and Louise, as Thelma is packing, she throws in her gun on a whim, even though she has never used it and is afraid of it. When we see that, it propels us into the future. We know that gun is going to be used and wait for it to happen. If it doesn't, we'll feel cheated.

Every story element needs to be set up: actions, character traits, character transformations, events, turning points, the ending. In The Pursuit of Happyness, set in the 1980s, we see the hero playing with a Rubik's cube, and we hear a report on TV about the fad it's set off (setup). In a later scene, the hero attempts to talk himself into a prestigious training program for stockbrokers, but the broker he's trying to impress is too wrapped up in the Rubik's cube to listen. The hero manages to complete the puzzle, thereby proving his smarts to the stockbroker (payoff).

When you set something up, it needs to evolve organically and naturally. The point is to tease without blatantly manipulating. It can't scream, "Hey, you! Look here!" Make the intervening stuff between the setup and the payoff pertinent to the story and interesting in its own right. Then deliver the payoff. Work on getting the timing right, which will vary from scene to scene and story to story. Don't leave people hanging too long, but don't close the gap too quickly either.

Theme

The theme of your story is its underlying issue, the thing it's about, the moral at the story's core. Theme is what transforms the film from a collection of interesting scenes to a unified whole. Theme gives the story its spine. It's the glue that binds.

Think of your theme as a thesis that your protagonist will prove either right or wrong. In Casablanca the theme is self-sacrifice for a higher purpose. Humphrey Bogart goes from insisting that he sticks his neck out for no one to sacrificing the woman he loves so that they can all battle tyranny. The theme of Wizard of Oz is, "There's no place like home." Common themes include "Crime doesn't pay," "Power corrupts," and "Reality is illusion."

How do you come up with your screenplay's theme? Sometimes theme is present from the very start, sometimes it emerges as you write. Each writer has a source of inspiration, an aspect of life that fascinates her and that she explores through her writing. Usually, your theme springs from that well. If you've chosen a story you truly believe in, the theme will become apparent.

Once you are able to articulate your theme, use that knowledge as you rewrite. Every scene, character dilemma, and event should either speak to that theme or contradict it. (See tip #36, Subplots.)

In many movies, the theme is stated outright early in the first act. How blatantly or how subtly you do this depends on your sensibilities and on the kind of movie you're writing. Be careful, however, not to use the theme to bash the audience over the head with a message. To loosely quote Samuel Goldwyn, movies don't deliver messages. Western Union does.

Subplots

Subplots are secondary storylines that either support or contrast the theme of the main storyline. If your theme is a thesis that your protagonist will prove either right or wrong, then the subplots are the different sides of the argument. They're the pros and cons. Supporting the thesis through one storyline and contradicting it through another enriches the story and generates curiosity about how the protagonist will resolve his dilemma. What will he choose? How will it turn out? Subplots also help give us a better sense of character.

One of the subplots in the movie Moonstruck (written by John Patrick Shanley) involves the main character's parents. Loretta's mother discovers that her husband, whom she truly loves, is having an affair. This subplot mirrors and plays out the theme, which is true love is a risk worth taking. Her mother's story underscores Loretta's dilemma: Will she play it safe in a loveless marriage? Or will she follow her heart and embrace vulnerability, as her mother did?

Subplots are complete stories with a beginning, middle, and end. They have their own protagonists, usually a secondary character. The subplot protagonist often goes through a change, but it's a shift rather than a profound transformation. That kind of journey is reserved for the hero.

Your decisions about where and how to begin and end your subplots will affect the pace of your entire story. You may want to have the major subplot climax coincide with the A-story climax, or slightly before or after. Be careful not to dilute the A-story climax with a too-big subplot climax. Be sure to wrap up any loose subplot threads in the resolution.

Exposition

Sometimes viewers need to know about something that happened before the movie began so they can understand the story. Or they need some background information on a character that explains his personality or behavior. Exposition, as this information is called, has to be delivered through setups, flashbacks, dialogue, or other subtle means, including visuals and music.

Writing exposition is tricky, because it can easily fall in the "telling" rather than "showing" mode. If you're too heavy-handed with your exposition, you pull the reader out of the fictional world. Good exposition is woven naturally into the story.

Exposition should be doled out on a "need to know" basis. Give the reader only as much as he needs to know right now in order to understand the story. A good way of creating suspense and masking exposition at the same time is by making the audience curious about what happened or what the character is hiding. In Casablanca, by the time the flashback of Rick and Ilsa in Paris rolls around, we are dying to know what happened between them.

One trick for revealing information the audience needs to know is to reveal it to a character who is also in the dark. In The Silence of the Lambs (novel by Thomas Harris, script by Ted Tally), Clarice's superior prepares her to meet Lecter. Because Clarice needs this information to do her job and stay safe, this bit of exposition comes across as believable. A more awkward bit of exposition is the opening scene of My Best Friend's Wedding. At dinner with George, Julianne checks her answering machine and learns her best friend Michael called. She then proceeds to tell George every detail we need to know about her relationship with Michael. The problem is, George is Julianne's second-best friend. Wouldn't he already know the story? That kind of information dump is pure telling. It pulls you out of the story.

Another trick is to reveal exposition through action. In Casino Royale (novel by Ian Fleming, screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis) a scene was included to inform us of Bond's double-00 status, achieved once a spy kills twice. Bond is face-to-face with a spy gone bad. The spy is cautious but confident, sure that if he were really in trouble, the agency would have sent a double-00 agent. But, as he points out, Bond has only killed once. At that point, Bond pulls out a gun and shoots him, securing his double-00 status.

When writing exposition, search for ways to mask it. Don't tell us anything we don't need to know, and don't allow characters to discuss things they already know. Reveal exposition through action as much as you can. And create curiosity by holding on to exposition until it's absolutely essential to the story.

Genre

Stories are arranged by their shared elements into categories called genres. Aristotle gave us the first two genres by organizing stories according to their emotional charge. Positive or upbeat stories were categorized as "fortunate." Negative or downbeat ones were "tragic."
As storytelling evolved over the centuries, more and more genres and subgenres emerged. Today, no one can agree on how many genres exist or how to divide them.
Below is a description of some of the most common film genres and subgenres. All of these will be familiar to you and, as you will see, genres often overlap.
Comedy: This category includes romantic (There's Something About Mary) and screwball comedies (Rat Race), satires (Thank You for Smoking), and black comedies (Catch-22). Comedies are meant to amuse. Since it's hard to laugh at someone in danger, one of the most important rules of comedy is that no one gets hurt. No matter how many pratfalls a character takes, his reaction is always funnier than the injury is painful. The only exception is black comedy, where the scale tips toward laughs of discomfort.
Drama: Drama is an umbrella category for a serious portrayal of realistic characters, settings, and situations—in other words, everything that isn't a comedy. The important distinction here is the emotional charge. Comedies make us smile, laugh, and guffaw; dramas make us reflect, worry, and cry. The category drama has many subsets and includes movies like Kramer vs. Kramer, The English Patient, and Rain Man.
Action/Adventure: Action films are fast-paced, mile-a-minute rides. Explosions, chases, and battles figure prominently. Adventure films usually revolve around some kind of quest, and are often set in exotic locales. Action and adventure are so intertwined that they are often treated as one. Some sub-genres are: disaster/survival films (The Day After Tomorrow), treasure hunts (Romancing the Stone), swashbucklers (Pirates of the Caribbean), and spy films (Casino Royale).
Crime: Here, the main storyline revolves around a crime committed. Among this category's many sub-genres are: police dramas (Se7en), gangster films (The Untouchables), film noir (The Maltese Falcon), courtroom dramas (12 Angry Men), and thrillers (The Manchurian Candidate).
Horror: Designed to scare the living daylights out of us, horror films shock and thrill at the same time. In his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting, Robert McKee divides horror into three subgenres: the uncanny, in which the source of horror is subject to rational explanation (Psycho), the supernatural, in which the source of horror is irrational or from the spirit world (Poltergeist), or the super-uncanny, where the audience is kept guessing between the two other possibilities.

Learn more:
The genres above are only one way of classifying story types. For a thought-provoking take on the issue, check out Blake Snyder's book Save the Cat.

Genre Conventions

"Understand the conventions of the genre you're writing for," says screenwriter Susannah Farrow. "There are certain things moviegoers expect to see in a comedy and other things they expect to see in a thriller. Make sure you include those things."

Audiences have their favorite genres and are well versed in genre conventions. If they've come to see a comedy, they want laughs. But they also want original situations, not something they've seen a hundred times. To write successfully within a genre, a writer must study and master its conventions while avoiding its clichés.

The choice of genre may impose conventions on:
• setting (the West in a western, a battle in a war film)
• roles (detective and criminal in a detective story)
• events (boy-meets-girl in a love story)
• emotional expectations (in an action/adventure, will the hero save the day? In a horror movie, will the axe murderer strike again?).

Some genres have many conventions. Let's take a crime story as an example. The audience expects: a crime to occur early on; someone to investigate; twists in the form of false clues, multiple suspects, or the revelation of hidden layers; and a showdown (physical, intellectual, or both) between the criminal and the investigator.

The hardest part of writing within a genre is avoiding its clichés. The first writer who revealed that the criminal was really a corrupt cop found an exciting, new twist. But by now that device has become an overused gimmick. Find ways of meeting audience expectations without resorting to clichés.

Watch as many movies in your genre as you can, and study their scripts. Ask the following questions: What are the conventions of settings, roles, and events? What emotional expectations are the films fulfilling? What's been done to death? What's original? How is your script like these movies, and how does it differ? Can you give the events that have to happen in your story a fresh, contemporary twist without committing any genre sins or falling into formulaic writing?

Understanding genre is an essential element of good writing. If you master your genre and its conventions, you'll be able to pay off audience expectation with skill, originality, and elegance. And if you wish to write a genre-defying script, your knowledge of genre will only make your experiment bolder.

Beats, Scenes, And Scene Sequences

A beat is the smallest structural unit of a script and is defined as an exchange of action/reaction. It's a line of dialogue, an action, or a reaction that creates an emotional moment. For example, a woman dressed for an evening out checks the clock—her date is late. She's annoyed (beat #1). The doorbell rings. Angry, she opens the door (beat #2). Her date tumbles in, bloodied and bruised. Her anger turns to horror and concern (beat #3). As we see from this example, beats are strung together to build a scene.

A scene is a continuous action in a single location. Each scene functions as a mini-story, with a beginning, middle, and end. A scene has its own protagonists. This could be the hero, the antagonist, or some other character depending on the scene's purpose. The scene's protagonist must have a goal (she wants to go out) and face obstacles (her date is first late, then incapacitated).

Scenes accomplish the following tasks:
• Create anticipation and move the story forward
• Reveal conflict
• Reveal character
• Elicit emotion

The best scenes accomplish several tasks at a time. Once you've clarified a scene's dramatic purpose, set it visually and dynamically. Keep your script tight by narrowing the timeframe of its action: Start the scene as late within the action being depicted as possible, and end it as soon as possible, leaving the moviegoer to imagine part of the scene's buildup and aftermath. Scenes link together to form sequences.

A scene sequence is made up of several scenes that work together to build tension toward a bigger climax. In a sequence in which the hero's wife leaves him, scene one could be an argument during which he pushes her. In scene two, he calls from work to apologize but she says she's leaving. In scene three, he rushes home to find her gone. Each scene has a climax—the push, the wife's announcement, the realization she's gone. But they all contributed toward the climax of the sequence—his realization that she's gone.

An act is constructed out of scenes and scene sequences that build toward a climax bigger than each of the scene sequence climaxes. The information revealed in an act climax is so new and shocking that it completely changes the protagonist's situation. An act climax is also called a turning point (see below). Acts are discussed in more detail in tips #27-30.