Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 21.18: Deconstructing the Three Act Structure

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-18-deconstructing-the-three-act-structure

Key Points: Three act structure: setup, confrontation, and resolution. Describing normal: establishing the main characters and their relationships and the world they live in. The ordinary world. What's going on, who are the characters, why should I care about them, why am I invested in this story. What is the status quo? By page 5, what story are we reading, what is going on? What is the main action, what are the stakes? Pose a major dramatic question. KPop Demon Hunters. A reason to care. Ground the reader. Set up the overall theme, who we're going to spend time with, where we're going to be, and genre/mood. Stakes. 

Act 2: rising action. The protagonist attempt to resolve the problem initiated by the first turning point. Where your try-fail cycles happen. The meat. Act 2 commercial break: dark night of the soul, big crisis, big reveal. The solution that creates the next problem. Purchasing the frame before you know what the painting is. Traversal and transformation.

Act 3: resolution. Climax. Confluence. Punch the reader, then give them a moment to breathe. The scene of aftermath.

[Season 21, Episode 18]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 18]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Deconstructing the Three Act Structure.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm very delighted to have a long time friend to the podcast back with us, Margaret Dunlap.

[Margaret] It's delightful to be here. Thank you for having me.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the reasons we wanted to bring Margaret into these is that, besides writing prose, Margaret is also a screenwriter working in Hollywood. And today we're going to be talking about the three act structure. Which is a classic structure. One of the ways that it was popularized was by a book by Sid Field in 1979 called Screenplay, The Foundations of Screenwriting. So the way he describes it is that the three acts are the setup, the confrontation, and the resolution. Act 1, Act 2, act 3. I would get very salty about the whole idea of a three act structure, because I'm like, three acts, three act breaks, came from theater, and you need them to move scenery around. So, when you said that you have actually read this book...

[Margaret] Oh, I have indeed.

[laughter]

[Margaret] I am aging myself by admitting that, but, yeah. No, when I was first coming up, taking my first screenwriting courses, that was like... That was the Bible of the time.

[Mary Robinette] Can you talk to us a little bit about what you think it... Like... The... Let's... I guess...

[Howard] No, what is the three act structure really, Margaret?

[laughter]

[DongWon] You also said that in a way like you had no opinions about this book whatsoever. So, yeah.

[Margaret] I also want to clarify that, like, it came out in 1979... I was not reading it in 1979.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] It just took a while for there to be a lot of popular screenwriting books. Like, that market was wide open for a long time.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So as I understand it, the first act is about establishing the main characters and their relationships and the world they live in. Sometimes this is called describing normal. I've seen several failure modes of describing normal in early manuscripts, early career manuscripts. Can we talk about, like, what... Why we want to do that in that first act?

[Margaret] Yeah. Sure. We can do that. I didn't mean to cut you off there. It's a... No, I think, we talk about the failure mode, if it's like the ordinary world, if people are familiar with Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey, which was also very big at the time, of, it's like, oh, it's the hero's journey, and we've had many discussions on this podcast about the hero's journey and the strengths and weaknesses thereof. But there's this idea that you're starting in the ordinary world. Like, to get the audience on board with what's going on, who are the characters, why should I care about them, why am I invested in this story, you have to let them know what the status quo is. And, I think, for writers who are early in their own Journeys, it can feel like, well, nothing's allowed to happen starting out, because I have to set up what's going on and where things are. And it's a... And you do have to set up what's going on and who are these people and what does their day-to-day look like, but at the same time, that doesn't mean that things can't be starting to change or starting to be in flux. Exciting things can still be going on. But I think there's this idea of, like, okay, in a screenplay format at the time, the first 25 to 30 pages were just sort of tooting around to find the plot as it were. And that just... there was also a time when pacing was slower on these things. And now that's... If you are a writer of a spec screenplay, that's not going to fly. Like, you've gotta let your reader know...

[Howard] You need to do something a little more interesting well before the 22 page mark.

[Margaret] But by... Honestly, before page 5, like...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] You've got to let people know, like, what story are we reading, what is going on. And that's just the way that storytelling, American storytelling specifically, and I think this is also somewhat true on the fiction side as well, has just evolved. There is an expectation of you're going to let me know, like, what is this story going to be about, what is... At least an idea of the main action that might evolve, but, like, what are the stakes. Because that really is what gets your reader invested, of knowing, okay, what am I worried might happen and what do I hope will come to pass instead?

[Mary Robinette] And as I understand it, in the original idea, that this establishing of stakes is basically posing a major dramatic question. Like, is the boy going to get the girl? Are they going to stop the terrorists? And that the answer is going to be either yes or no. When I'm dealing with openings, and as I said, I bounced very hard off of the idea of the three act structure, but I... When we've been doing the deconstruction of it, I'm like, oh, okay, I see the elements that are common in other things. But I do have, like, a thematic problem, even if it's not the big problem, and it usually escalates from there. Like, if it's a story that's going to be about a haunted house, there's a squeak and they can't figure out where the squeak is coming from. And so there's that disruption of normal, but it's not the big one yet.

[Erin] As you were saying that, it made me wonder if this is why so many, and maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like so many rom-coms start at a wedding that is not the protagonist's wedding.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it establishes, like, this is the thing. Like, we are all about love. But this person doesn't have it. But, by the end, they will. And like therefore you know, in that first five pages, exactly the realm that you're in, at least.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly. It's like my sister's getting married, and I'm stuck at her wedding without a date. And it's like that sets up that dilemma.

[Howard] And by the same token, when we've started... When we talk about cold opens with action, we have an action scene that resolves in some sort of success, typically, and that describes to us what normal is. This is an action movie that will end with a heroic resolution of the story.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think sometimes when we talk about establishing the normal, it can sound kind of flat. Right? It can sound kind of like, there's the character going to school and experiencing his normal life or whatever it is. But I think a recent example of an action cold open that establishes the new normal, or the existing normal, in a really effective way is KPop Demon Hunters. Right? We start with this incredible physical fight scene on an airplane that they jump out of, and then they perform their concert and we get all of the stakes that are being set up in terms of establishing the Honmoon, like all the big global stakes, the worldbuilding, but then also the personal stakes over that opening sequence, of what do they stand to lose, what do they stand to gain, which ends in a reveal of the true stakes for the main character of her needing to keep her secret, and then accomplish this stage thing so that she can go back to being normal, or... Also, because we're talking about how pacing and expectations for storytelling have changed, but also, even if you're looking at some sort of classic Hollywood examples, which is the sort of movies that Sid Field was talking about when he did this sort of structural breakdown for screenplays. You look at a movie like Chinatown or Citizen Kane. Like, Chinatown starts with our lead character, he's showing photos of the wife having an affair to his client and his client being like, I'm going to kill her. You're allowed to do that, it's an unspoken thing. And you think you have that kind of money and class, you jerk. Like, no, rich people are allowed to kill their unfaithful wives, you, you are not. And that sort of... It sets up his job, it sets up the theme, we know immediately what he does. And it's not long after that Faye Dunaway shows up. Or that... It's been a while since I saw Chinatown. But, like, since he gets... Gets involved in what's going to be the main case of the film...

[Erin] Your mention of KPop Demon Hunters made me think that, like, musical theater is like this is... Most music, not all, but...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Many, many musicals start with this sort of like here is the world and let me know...

[DongWon] It's a thing we do. Yeah.

[Erin] It's a thing, and it's interesting, because it works on a couple different levels. One is to literally tell you, like, here's the setting, here's the general vibe. But also musically, it gives you a sense of if you're at Les Miserables or if you're at Hamilton, you're going to get very different opening songs.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If, like, Les Miserables began with a hip hop opening, you would be really confused for the rest of the time [garbled]

[laughter]

[Erin] And people are like, when are they coming back?

[laughter]

[DongWon] [garbled what garbled name is garbled worst nightmare garbled] I feel very torn.

[Margaret] I'm 100% in. When you said that, I immediately thought of Bonjour from Beauty and the Beast...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Which is literally let me run down this whole town for you...

[Erin] Can we talk trash about the entire town? That's really pretty...

[DongWon] He has a beef with everybody, that Baker, on sight.

[Margaret] Make a different bread and rolls.

[laughter]

[Erin] My question for this is, like, what is the version of that that we're doing on the page? Like, How do we let people know whether they are in Hamilton or whether they are in Les Mis... What's the kind of story that they're going to be getting?

[Mary Robinette] Like, I talked about this a lot, and from a purely crass commercial, you have to help the editor when you're starting out, that within the first 13 lines, you need to have some reason for us to care. That... Like, my first three sentences, I'm attempting to ground the reader, because sometimes people just don't read past those first three sentences. Sometimes it is setting up the overall theme of the thing, but I want them to know sort of who we're going to spend time with, sort of where we're going to be, and the genre/mood that we're in, which is what we're talking about establishing with these. It's just... I think we're talking about establishing the same things, it's just the metrics that we use for marking how and when we get them in are somewhat different.

[DongWon] It's all about stakes. All of it.

[Mary Robinette] So we're talking about all of these things that were supposed to happen in act 1, and one of the things that is confusing about it, I think, was confusing about it for me, was thinking that act one had to be a third of the book, and that is not the case. So, you can do an act one that is very fast, and then get into the middle of it. And that, I think, is going to take us to our break. And then after the break, we're going to talk about Act 2.

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[Mary Robinette] All right. So we're going to talk about Act 2. As we've mentioned, these things don't have to be proportional.

[laughter]

[Margaret] Act 3 is going to be 1 minute at the end. So brace yourself.

[DongWon] Acts 2 and 3...

[Mary Robinette] So in Act 2, according to this original, Act 2 is the rising action, and typically it's describing... I'm honestly looking at Wikipedia for this. Typically, it's depicting the protagonist's attempt to resolve the problem initiated by the first turning point. The turning point is often like an inciting incident or something that causes or forces the protagonist to get more active. So now they are. Now they're dealing with this, they've got this big problem, we're doing some more character development, and they're attempting to deal with the... Confront the problem. In this confrontation. So what are some of the pieces of this act 2 that we've got to juggle and look at?

[Margaret] Yeah. I think what's interesting about that description of Act 2 as the rising action, which... Looking back with experience, like, oh, yeah, I can see what that's going towards. But it's also in the filled in analysis, Act 2 is about half your screenplay pages. So, at the time, you thought of a screenplay as 120 pages, Now if you're writing a screenplay, 120 pages is probably too long. But you'd have like 30 pages in act one, 60 pages of act 2, and then 30 pages of act 3. And act 3 is clearly where the big exciting climax happens, the quick resolution happens, like, that's all going to be very exciting stuff. And it's like so what the heck do I do with this vast 60 page desert in the middle of my screenplay that is described as rising action. And I think... I was talking to Howard one time when I was visiting you guys and you were talking about who is it described Act 2 is where all the fun exciting things that are going to be in the trailer happen. Because it is the bulk of...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] The movie or the story or the novel, like, this is actually where the process is the point. It's the...

[Howard] It's where your try-fail cycles typically land.

[Margaret] It's where your try-fail cycles happen. It's... I frequently would break down for my students, talking about Shakespeare on a kind of five act model, and that's... You look at Romeo and Juliet. They meet very early. They get married in Act 2. People forget how quickly that happens in that play. Like, there's that idea of like, oh, it has to be rising up to the big thing. It's like, no, other things can be happening. It's as Howard said, the try-fail cycles...

[DongWon] It's one thing I think about a lot when I'm reading pitches. Right? Because the pitches will often be very good at establishing act one information of who are these characters, what are the stakes, what are the world. And a lot of times, I'll come back with, okay, but what are they doing in this book? Like, what's the actual, like, meat of the book? Like, cool concept, love the concept, love these characters, the vibes through the roof, but what are we actually getting into? And I think being able to give some indication of that and having a sense of that. And sometimes when you hear about what the meat is, you're like, oh, that sounds actually very boring. Never mind.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right? And so, I think being aware that the bulk of your book is this act two place, and that needs to be interesting and dynamic and engaging is actually something that's quite difficult to do. This is when we start talking about soggy middles and things like that.

[Howard] The classic, Margaret, correct me if I get the numbers wrong... 47 minute TV episode... Is it 43? I've...

[Margaret] Yeah. 47 [garbled] 47's good enough.

[Howard] But the classic application of 3 act structure there is act one, commercial break, half of Act 2, commercial break, the other half of Act 3, commerc... Or the other half of Act 2, commercial break, and then act 3.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And it's really useful for me in thinking about three act structure, to deconstruct it in that way and to carve Act 2 into two pieces. Because in a lot of... In a great many TV shows, that act 2 commercial break is your Dark Night of the Soul, it's a big crisis, it's a big reveal, it's a big something, and just being able to put a pin in that and say, hey, about halfway through Act 2, I'm going to start the other half of Act 2, and I'm going to start it with something big.

[Erin] That's what... Thinking about it that way makes me wonder... I think a false solution... When I was thinking about what's happening at like a... I also love this where there's only like four... with commercial breaks in a show. I'm like, oh, that was beautiful. Those days...

[Margaret] Those halcyon days.

[DongWon] Indeed.

[Erin] Now they're like every 3 seconds. Jump scaring me with RSV.

[laughter]

[Erin] But like the... Sorry. You can cut that. But like it's the false solution. Like, I think about, like, Law and Order episodes, for example, where it's like the act one that you're talking about, it's like finding the dead body and they're like, aha! We've caught the person. Like, and then it's like, but for blah blah legal reasons, we can't just throw them in jail. We have to do the other half. And, like, figure out... And do all of our legal shenanigans to get something happened. Or, in Star Trek, when you solve the first thing, but then it breaks something else on the ship.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] When you reverse the polarity and now you're like, oh, no, now negative is positive and positive is negative. How do we deal with that?

[Margaret] Yeah. When I was teaching screenwriting and I would frequently teach the writing the television pilot class, and most prestige TV that stays these days is in a format where you don't necessarily have that network commercial breaks...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Where you don't... There were three, there were four, there were five. However many we can put before we get in trouble with the FCC. And I would always say, like, write your pilot with act breaks ...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] And then pull them out. Because what these breaks do, it's like when you're writing to the break or to the turn at the end of the act, it's that thing that's going to propel us forward into what's happening next.

[Mary Robinette] I sometimes describe this as the solution that creates the next problem.

[DongWon] One thing I wanted to flag as we're getting deep into this conversation is, I think there's a lot of failure states of this three act structure. Right? You can have soggy middles, you can have boring openings, like all these things. But, to return to the KPop Demon Hunters again, that movie is one of the most classic examples of an application of the three act structure. Literally, the first... I think it divides very evenly in terms of the percentages that we're talking about, in terms of 1/4 being act 1, half being act two, 1/4 being act 3. And, part of the reason I think that movie is... Hits so hard, is because of its adherence to really classical storytelling structures. And it does it in a really dynamic, fun, contemporary way. But I think that's a great example of when you can see this working. Right? And when it hits, by God, it hits. You know what I mean? Our brains love that structure. It's very satisfying to have that normal, Rising, conclusion.

[Mary Robinette] I think the failure mode of that is where we don't think about what happens in the middle.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So I often think about the things on the outside as framing what is happening in the middle. Like, as you say, the bulk of the story happens in the middle, and so the beginning and end set it up. But we spend a lot of time thinking about how is it going to start? What's the big thing that's going to happen at the end, the conclusion? And for me, since like... Switching from my background in theater to my background as an art major, it's like purchasing the frame before you figure out what the painting is.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] So when we're thinking about this midpoint, one of the things that I find very... The midpoint, the... Or the Act 2 is I find it very useful to think about what problem are they trying to solve and how are they trying to solve it? And those give you things that you can escalate, as opposed to how long do I have to wait until I get to my really cool thing, my climax?

[Margaret] Yeah. Something that I've found useful in working through Act 2 was actually something that I came across in a book I read in college about directing for the theater, and one of the things that this author was talking about was, like, you have a play and it's like everything's going great, and it's a tragedy, so it ends on a down note. And it's like you've been working on act one, working on act one, and then you go and you work on the second act and you're working on Act 2, and then you put it together the first time and all of the energy in act 1 is just gone, because all your actors are thinking about the fact that they know how this is going to end. And I think as authors, we can do that as well. It's like whether you're an outliner or you're going back later to sort of shape things, and you got through this more by the seat of your pants, it is that feeling of, like, well, I know where this is going, so I know that all of this is just marking time to get to what's really going on, and you really have to sort of... For me, I have to force myself in terms of, like, I know, but my characters don't.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret] So what are they doing with the best information they have at the time? Because, like, they don't know where they are in the book. We know, the reader knows...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] But they always have to be going, no, no, this is the bit that's going to work.

[DongWon] Sometimes you can really feel that in terms of, like, the writer knows the inevitable conclusion to all of this, so it becomes a real like yada yada yada to the middle point. Right? Of just like... And I've seen people do this on a micro level, too, where an action scene is happening, and they'll just be like, yeah, yeah, some fight stuff happens, and then here's where we're at too at the end of it. You know what I mean? And it's like, I don't know, that's the end of the bulk of it. You can't ignore Act 2. But, with that, should we start talking about moving on to conclusion?

[Erin] One quick thing first, I just want to say, I was trying to figure out, well, how do you not do that? And I think one way to trick yourself into creating small little, like, act 1, 2, 3's within...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Your act 2. Like, because in some ways, like, try-fail cycles are like figuring out what it is that it is wrong, trying it, and then failing, and the fail is the fun act 3...

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] And then you just build one upon the other. It's sort of like in a relationship, you're like, oh, my relationship is stale, we're going to introduce date night, because we're going to actually, like, create...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] A little mini version of our tomance that's going to happen in the middle of our bigger lives together.

[Mary Robinette] I use that... That idea of the mini things when I'm looking at the big thing in the middle, I will look at barriers or obstacles between the protagonist and the goal. And then each barrier has try-fail cycles that go with it. So the barriers are like a macro version. So, like, in order to get to something, I need to get through this door. But then there's the smaller try-fail cycles that are involved in getting through the door. I try the knob. It's locked. I try the key. It breaks off in the lock. I get a crowbar. I get it open, and now there are bees on the other side of it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which is my next barrier.

[DongWon] In a few weeks, we're really going to dig into using microcosms...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] To sort of illustrate all this on a macro scale, and I think it's going to be a really fun conversation.

[Howard] Two words that helped me understand why Act 2 has to be there are traversal and transformation. I have to traverse the terrain, I have to climb the mountain, I have to do whatever. There are obstacles. And I have to transform myself along that journey. Those two things have to happen. If the story doesn't require them, then you go from act 1 to act 3 and you're done. If the story does require them, then allow us to enjoy them. The traversal is interesting, the transformation is passionate. And that's why I love having just those two words on tap for me to remind myself of why Act 2 should be there.

[Mary Robinette] I'm glad you said that, because I think that that is an important thing, that these are ingredients of the three act structure. But not every story is a 3 act structure.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And this is one of the reasons we wanted to do this deconstruction. So, let's move to our last Act, which is act 3. And act three, according to Sid field, is called the resolution. So, the resolution, according to the Wikipedia of the resolution...

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] He really came up with Dynamic names for all...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Of these, didn't he?

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Margaret] [garbled] this [garbled] is going to be exciting.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I actually really like it, because they're so much more descriptive than the seven point plot structure, which we're going to get to with Dan later, which is...

[DongWon] Like pinching and other things...

[Mary Robinette] I don't know... I don't want that much pinching.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, in the act 3, the third Act, we've got the resolution of the story and it's subplots, but we also have the climax, which is where things are brought to kind of the most intense point, and we answer our dramatic question, according to Wikipedia, leaving the protagonist and other characters with a new sense of who they really are, and thank you to whoever this anonymous Wikipedia person was. So, these are beats that we see in other things. With act 3, that idea of the climax happening there, that's again a thing I think a lot of people sort of struggle with, and then struggle with what to do after that. Because now everything has been solved. So what are sort of some of the, I guess, the nuances of act 3?

[Margaret] Wow. You're saying that and I'm thinking, oh, I should say something smart, and I'm just going like...

[Mary Robinette] Do you want to take a second?

[Howard] If I may...

[Margaret] Go for it.

[Howard] I don't like the word climax, because it's in so many other domains. I prefer the word confluence. I prefer thinking about all of the things that have been happening arriving at one point so that lots of things are kind of happening at once. That's not a perfect description of it, but in my mind, it helps me sort things out a little better. And helps remind me that I have a lot of threads that have to be tied together.

[Mary Robinette] You remind me of when we had Lou Anders on many seasons ago. You all can... We'll link to it in the show notes. But the Hollywood ending. That at the end, the hero reconciles with the viewpoint character, defeats the villain, and solves the problem. Which is basically what we're talking about happening here at the climax. That the, oh, we feel better about ourselves, or not, depending on the type of...

[Margaret] Depending on how it goes. Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Depending on the type of the show. Bad guy gets just desserts and whatever the problem is, everything's okay now. Or not.

[Margaret] Or not. Yeah. It's... When I was... My first TV show I worked on, the middleman for the time ABC Family, which was a delightful and bonkers experience, but one of the writers in the room introduced a term of art that has always stuck with me, because we'd be breaking the story, working out what's going to happen, what are the scenes, how is it going, and there'd always reach the point where, like, we're getting towards the end or working backwards, and it's like, okay, we know what the big conflict resolution is going to be, it's like we're confronting the boy band which is actually a bunch of intergalactic dictators trying to get back to their home galaxy, we have located the cursed cue ball of the Titanic and we have to prevent this guy from playing it or else all of us will be drowning in the icy waters of the North Atlantic... Actual episodes. And then, Anne Huntsman would always be there, it's like, and then it's the mad dash for the logo.

[laughter]

[I love that]

[Margaret] Referring to logos, the showrunners' sort of vanity card at the end.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret] It's like, we do that and then it's like you've got a little bit of time to, like, if you want to put that nice little button, nice little sort of like... Maybe there's like a B story that you have to resolve, like [Wendy and Lacey] her roommate, has had a conflict and she comes back from saving the world and is like, yeah, here, we're going to have our moment. And then just, boom, you're cutting out.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Margaret] And I think in short fiction, that's really useful...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] To remember because there is that expectation of, like, we're hitting you, bam, and then there'll be a nice little graphic at the bottom of the paragraph to let you know that it's over.

[Erin] It's funny that you said like hitting you, because I... To continue with a lot of violence that I have in my soul...

[laughter]

[Erin] One of the things that I think is... That I sometimes see in writer's work, is that... It's like you punched someone in the stomach, and then you walked away before you actually got to see the expression on their face.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So you do want to linger, like, just long enough to kind of get it, because if you punch the reader and then, like, they don't have a chance to actually, like, process it on the page, sometimes they process it at your page...

[gasp]

[Erin] Which you don't want, and then they hate you and your story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You want to give them a moment to breathe. Not a long moment.

[Margaret] You want that scene of aftermath.

[Erin] Just a moment.

[DongWon] There's a really great video essay that's about Hong Kong action scenes, on every trim, a painting. Where he talks about how you see the punch [garbled] land three different times. Right? Because you see it, and then you see the thing, and then you see the consequences of the thing, and it's really important to make space for that. Right? And one of the nice things about novel versus screenwriting is you have a little bit more space for that denouement. I mean, we talked about this a bit in the hero's journey episode, but the scouring of the Shire. Right? You have time to go back and sort of see who are these characters now that they've gone through their transformation and to close out that arc. I mean, Lord of the Rings has a thousand character arcs that need to be resolved, which is why the ending of that book takes so long. And in a novel, you don't always want to go that deep with it. But, you have a little bit more space and a little bit less of a sprint to the logo, as you put it, then you might have in other media.

[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of the sprint for the logo, I believe that it is time for homework. So, for homework, what I want you to do is I want you to take a fairy tale. Just a classic fairy tale. Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks, any of those. And diagram it out as a 3 act structure, just to see what it would do. Do you need to add elements to it in order to make it fit that? So, give that a try on something that's already existing out in the world. And with that, you are out of excuses, now go write.