Be Brave Project, Day 53; Three Act Structure, Cont'd

Three Act Structure, Cont'd: Act II

1. Midpoint, discussed yesterday. An action is taken which increases the jeopardy or which makes it harder to turn back OR the midpoint takes the form of a reversal, making things significantly worse or forces main character to more desperate action. Not every story has a midpoint, but it is a useful way of focusing the second act, and pushing the main character towards. . .


2. End of the Second Act/Second Turning Point. The main character is pushed to her limits. Things have gotten as bad as they could possibly get short of death--OR the mc has lost the thing they value most--OR the journey they undertook at the beginning of Act Two has completely runaground. In On the Waterfront, Terry's brother is killed and Terry knows he is next. In "Tootsie" Michael will not find happiness as Dorothy and must re-assume his male identity to find fulfillment. With his/her back up to the wall, the main character makes a statement of transformation. A new course of action takes shape. With everything else having failed, the main character now sees what must be done in. . .

THE THIRD ACT (tomorrow)

I always have a problem getting my mind around the end of the second act, and find it easier to think of it as the second-act turning point. It seemed to me that it was a sort of shifting of gear that would inevitably lead towards the slide into the third act, as in "A person isn't getting the results they want, so they change-this change forces the situation so that they either get what they want or they finally irrevocably find it's impossible. Quick slide into home."

But when I was working on the screenplay adaptation it was clear that it wasn't that simple or that reductive: At the end of the second act you have at 30 pages to go (that's 30 minutes in a film, or 60 pages in a book). If it's all a long slide towards home, that'll be a little boring. I realized that for me, what is most important about the End of the Second Act is the statement of transformation. In that screenplay the SOT was when a former drunken frivolous London party girl states her intent to stay in the Irish countryside--this statement indicates an enormous change in character and focus--and results in 2 deaths by the end of the third act.

So with the Augusta novel, she will be in London, she will have been chasing after her 'dead' ex-husband. . .and she will discover--what? List of things it could be:

• that he's married


• that he has a twin and she's been chasing the twin


• that he put out a hit on her


• that he loves her


• that he left a note behind--and someone else destroyed it


• that he took money to go away


• that he was ill when he left--thought he was dying--and believed she couldn't take it, so just took off. When he lived he didn't know how to go back to her.

And how will it change her??

The most important change that happens to her during the book is that she will stop drinking. At the beginning she is a daily black-out drinker, but something happens in London that will force her to stop. She will have a bad 3 days or so. Will this stopping drinking happen this late in the book, at the end of the second act?? Or will it happen earlier, and the end of the second act will result in A. going to buy a big ass bottle of vodka. . .reverting to drunken type but afterwards emerging stronger, with her mind made up.

I am going to print this out and think about it. . .