In my last post, I covered the four pillars of plot. If you haven’t read that post yet, I recommend you give it a read before continuing on with this post. Here, I’ll show you how you can use those four pillars to plot your story’s three acts.
Before we start, keep in mind that any literary theory is a guide and a tool—not a prescriptive rule that you have to follow to the letter. The structure I’m about to outline has flexibility. Just keep in mind this quote from Picasso: “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” You have to deeply understand fundamental writing principles before you can do a good job of bending and breaking them in a way that still benefits the story. So if you want to play around with story structure, go for it. Just make sure you deeply understand what makes story structure compelling first. That way, you’ll know what you’re doing and won’t accidentally go breaking the story itself.
What to Know Before You Start Plotting
Here is a quick refresher on the concepts we covered in the last post. These are the four aspects you should settle on before you start plotting specific events:
- The Driving Narrative Question: Your story’s beginning should pose a question that the middle explores and the ending answers. We call that question the driving narrative question. It’s what motivates readers to keep reading.
- The Protagonist’s External Goal: In tandem with the driving narrative question, your protagonist should have a clear external goal that they are trying to achieve through the story.
- The Driving Thematic Question: The stories that deeply impact us are the ones that help us explore questions about what it means to be human. You can think of a story’s philosophical focus as its driving thematic question. This thematic question should relate to your protagonist’s internal goal.
- The Protagonist’s Internal Goal: A character’s internal goal is the underpinning motivation behind their every decision. Characters may or may not be aware of their internal goal, but it still fundamentally defines who they are as a person. An internal goal could be to be in control of one’s own life, or to protect the innocent and vulnerable, or to gain the security of always having more power than everyone else around you.
These are the four pillars of plot that will naturally give your story its three‑part structure. Let’s look at the specific plot beats that fill your story’s three acts.
Act I: The Beginning
The Hook: Introducing the Status Quo
To make the reader care about the characters, the story needs to start with introducing the characters, the setting, and the status quo. The protagonist often feels unfulfilled by some aspect of their current life situation. But their status quo is also largely safe and stable. That’s why, even though the protagonist wants some change in their life, they’ll be hesitant about doing anything that could jeopardize their current safe—or at least stable—situation.
To make this exposition interesting, you need to present it in a way that hooks readers. I’ve seen a lot of writers talk about how you need to start the story right at the inciting incident to hook the reader. The risk with that approach is that the story will then jump into the action without giving the reader enough time to become invested in the characters. If the reader isn’t invested in the characters, the story won’t feel as intense. The reader also won’t have a deep emotional response if a central character is in danger or dies.
The craft of writing a good hook is worthy of a whole blog post on its own. For now, I’ll just say that a good hook does two things: it piques the reader’s curiosity and makes the reader invested in the characters. You don’t need to start with the inciting incident to do that. If you do start with the inciting incident, make sure you still give the reader enough time with the characters to get invested in them before act two starts.
The Inciting Incident: Introducing the Threat
Next, an event happens that threatens the status quo and launches the protagonist into the story’s first dilemma. This incident will introduce at least some aspect of the story’s central antagonistic force. But most importantly, this event offers the protagonist the opportunity to go an a journey that could give them the personal fulfillment that they currently lack.
In the language I introduced in the last post, this event offers the protagonist a new external goal that also gives them the opportunity to fulfill their deeper internal goal. But the presence of an antagonistic force makes this new path dangerous. The protagonist can only pursue this new external goal at the risk of destroying their stable status quo.
People also refer to the inciting incident as the call to adventure. There are two important elements that make this call compelling: choice and risk.
Giving the protagonist the ability to say “no” to the adventure makes their choice to still go as emotionally impactful as possible. If the inciting incident forces the protagonist to go with no other choice, then the protagonist’s journey won’t feel as interesting and the plot point won’t feel as emotionally resonant.
This choice to go on the adventure should also be embedded with risk. The adventure world should be dangerous, and the protagonist should recognize the risks as they consider whether to accept the call. If it’s easy for the protagonist to choose to go on the adventure, then this plot point won’t be as compelling as it could be.
The End of the Beginning: The Protagonist Accepting the Call to Adventure
Eventually, an event happens that forces the protagonist to respond to the inciting incident and make a decision. If they choose to go on the adventure—which they inevitably will because otherwise there wouldn’t be a story—the choice will propel them through a door of no return. They will travel out of the stable normal world and into the unstable adventure world. This unstable adventure world is filled with the potential for both peril and triumph, destruction and growth. The only way for the protagonist to return to a stable world is to see the tumultuous journey through to the other side.
The protagonist accepting the call to adventure is the moment where the story firmly establishes and poses the driving narrative question. In its most basic form, the driving narrative question is always this: will the protagonist overcome the antagonistic force and achieve their external goal? The end of the beginning should firmly establish three things:
- what the protagonist’s goal is,
- what kind of antagonistic forces are standing in the way of achieving that goal,
- and what is at stake should the protagonist fail.
Without clear protagonist goals, the story will feel aimless. Without a clear antagonistic force, the story will lack conflict. And without clear stakes, the story will lack a sense of urgency and importance. All three of these aspects are necessary for a story to feel engaging and interesting.
Act II: The Middle
The middle can be one of the hardest parts of a story to write. It’s easy to think of the middle as just a series of exciting events that happens before the final climax. But that’s not a helpful framework. Throughout the middle, the reader needs to feel like the story is going somewhere. To create that sense of momentum, the central characters need to actively pursue their goals in every scene. And as they get closer to their goals—and struggle along the way—the stakes also need to increase. These two elements are the keys to writing a delicious and gripping middle.
Here are the key structural beats that give the middle this engaging shape of both rising action and rising stakes.
The First Pinch Point: The Protagonist’s Initial Response to the Antagonistic Force
The protagonist reacts to the events in the end of the beginning as they pursue their internal and external goals. As a result, a significant event happens that adds more conflict.
This is often a point in the story where the protagonist fails in some way. They’re still figuring out how to manage this new chaotic world. They often don’t fully understand what it will take to achieve both their internal and external goals. They may even have some kind of destructive or inaccurate belief about how the world works that is holding them back from making the right choices.
Some sort of failure throughout the middle’s plot points will help teach the protagonist lessons that they need to learn in order to overcome the antagonist in the later climax. These middle plot points are not just a series of exciting events. They’re necessary stepping stones that give the protagonist the insights and tools they will need to succeed in the final climax.
The Midpoint: Raising the Stakes
Half‑way through the story, an event comes that reinforces the story’s goals and stakes or serves as a key turning point. This turning point will usually force the protagonist to change their approach to dealing with the antagonistic force, often transitioning the character from a reactionary approach to a proactive approach. The protagonist has often not fully grasped the lesson they need to learn to overcome the antagonist. But they are beginning that process of growth and change that will eventually allow them to achieve their goals.
The Second Pinch Point: The Protagonist’s Response to the Increasing Conflict
As a result of the protagonist’s response to the middle turning point, another significant event adds more conflict. Just like in the first pinch point, this event has two potential outcomes. The protagonist will either succeed in getting closer to achieving their goal or they will fail. If they fail, that failure will give them the opportunity to learn a lesson that they’ll need in the final climax.
The Moment of Darkness
As the protagonist is reaching for their goal, an event happens that strips the characters of hope. In the aftermath of the event, the characters will briefly sit in a terrible calm before the storm. They only have the resources left for one final push.
This space of darkness marks another point of no return. The unstoppable final conflict will be the definitive moment where the protagonist either succeeds or fails at their ultimate goal. Instead of a call to adventure, the protagonist now faces a call to confrontation. In the moment of darkness, the protagonist accepts this terrible call and walks through the final door of no return.
Act III: The End
Climax
The protagonist faces their final confrontation. This conflict forces them to change (either themselves or the world around them) as they reach for their goal.
Resolution
The final scenes show the protagonist (or the world around them) as their changed selves. The protagonist has left the adventure world behind and returned to the stable normal world. But the world is different now. Their status quo has changed in some significant way as a result of their journey.
Now, there are four potential outcomes in any story:
The Entirely Successful Ending
In an entirely successful ending, the protagonist achieves both their internal and external goals. In other words, their external success allows them to reach a state of personal growth or fulfillment.
This is the most common ending, for obvious reasons. It’s an ending that leaves readers feeling good. But just because something is common doesn’t mean that it can’t also be profound. In well‑written stories, the protagonist still had to go through a difficult journey of peril and discovery to reach this success. When done right, stories with entirely successful endings both feel good and feed the reader’s soul.
The Bittersweet Ending
The protagonist can also fail their external goal but still achieve their internal goal. In this ending, the protagonist often realizes that their internal goal is fundamentally incompatible with their external goal. They then decide that their internal goal is more important than their external goal. This is often a self‑sacrificial ending that feels incredibly bittersweet. Internal goals are often more profound and personally impactful than external goals. As a result, this may be one of the most palatable of tragic endings. The true success did come. It just came at a very high cost.
The Corruption/Disillusionment Ending
Alternatively, the protagonist can achieve their external goal while failing their internal goal. This ending can leave the protagonist in one of two states: corruption or disillusionment.
In a corruption arc, the protagonist realizes that their internal goal is in conflict with their external goal before the climax starts. But in the climactic moment, they choose to pursue the external goal anyway. The protagonist consciously chooses to sacrifice their moral or personal integrity for the sake of achieving material gains. This is the ending of a negative arc story, where the journey doesn’t change the protagonist for the better. Instead, it changes the protagonist for the worse.
In a disillusionment arc, the protagonist often doesn’t realize just how incompatible their internal and external goals are until after it is too late. They’ve achieved their external goal, but in the resolution, they realize that their internal goal has been totally jeopardized. These protagonists become disillusioned with whatever construct they were consciously fighting for. They learn that the pure construct they thought they were fighting for was actually a source of corruption. In the end, the character does learn their lesson, but they learn it too late.
The Entirely Tragic Ending
In an entirely tragic ending, the protagonist fails at both their internal and external goals. They gain neither personal fulfillment nor external achievement. These protagonists often failed to learn any lesson at all until it was too late. The climax has come and gone, and the protagonist’s world is utterly shattered. These endings with seemingly no glimmer of hope at all are the hardest to write well.
All endings—be they tragic or happy—should still leave the reader with a satisfying sense of catharsis and resolution. It’s difficult to achieve that sense of satisfying catharsis with any tragic ending, but it’s especially hard with purely tragic endings. It’s possible, but if this is the ending you seek, proceed with caution and care.
Readers are far more likely to accept a mediocrely written happy ending. They are much less likely to accept a mediocrely written tragic ending. Remember: act one and act two need to be building toward your specific ending. If you build act one and act two up for a successful ending but then give the readers a tragic ending, your readers will be justifiably frustrated and angry.
The Game of Thrones TV show is an excellent example of this concept. The writers were going for a corruption ending. But they didn’t do enough in act two to prepare both the viewers and the character for that destructive shift in act three. As a result, the viewers roiled against the ending and rejected it.
So let that be a warning to you: if you want a tragic ending, you have to write it extremely well for the audience to accept it as a satisfying resolution.
Other Posts You May Like:
The Four Pillars of Compelling Plot Structure
The Secret Foundation of Strong Stories: The Driving Narrative Question
Eradicating Reader Boredom: How to Hook Your Reader and Never Let Go
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