Friday, September 30, 2005
Multiple Act Story Structures
Aristotle, observing the Greek playwrights of his time, wrote in the Poetics that successful stories have a beginning, middle, and end. This was later interpreted as the Three-Act Structure:
| Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 |
The Three-Act Structure gained popularity through time, especially in Italian opera and later in Hollywood movies. In Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey, he adapted Joseph Campbell's popular The Hero with a Thousand Faces mythology concept to the Three-Act Structure. Vogler's approach broke the three acts into twelve smaller movements of action and growth:
Ordinary World | Call to Adventure | Refusal of Call | Meeting Mentor |
Crossing Threshold | Tests, Allies, Enemies | Approach to Inmost Cave | Supreme Ordeal | Reward |
Road Back | Resurrection | Return with Elixir |
Other story structures dominated in different cultures and fields. The Five-Act Structure is linked historically with Elizabethan England, but actually predates Shakespeare to the Jews. (See The Song of Solomon in the Bible.) German writer Gustav Freytag in Technique of the Drama (1863) added shape to the theory. The Five-Act Structure contributes complexity to the basic Three-Act Structure by tweaking the middle:
Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | Act 4 | Act 5 |
As television dawned and grew in popularity, story structure morphed into another shape. Syd Field wrote in his book Screenplay about a Four-Act Structure. This form divided the long and often troublesome middle act into two distinct halves:
Act 1 | Act 2a | Act 2b | Act 3 |
Some writers, rebelling against the guidelines of multiple-act story structures, insist story is a whole and should be treated as one continuous Act. To prove their point, they indicate failed examples where story structure was treated as a paint-by-the-numbers system, lacking vital creativity.
Nevertheless, history has proven the universal audience appeal of multiple-act story structures. Most of them, regardless of the number of individual acts, overlay and expand on the basic Three-Act Structure. Few other numbers find clearer expression at the core of matter (animal, vegetable, mineral), time(past, present, future), and personhood (thought, word, deed).
