The 3-Act Structure: How to Write a Strong Act 1 Without Feeling Miserable
Here’s a true story. When I started law school at 25, I was certain that I was the dumbest person there. (That’s the word that I used in my head: dumbest.)
This certainty ran so deep that when a group of students went out to dinner together one of the first nights of school, and someone asked me how big the city I grew up in was, I was too embarrassed to tell him that I had absolutely no idea, so I just said, “medium.”
Not even medium-sized, just medium.
The first time I was cold-called in class, I couldn’t speak. I froze and stared at the suited professor in silence until he moved on to someone else out of sheer awkwardness. It was the only time I ever knew of that happening in a class in all of law school. So that’s fun?
My anxiety about being a fraud waiting to be found out was so great that I started skipping class. I knew it wasn’t sustainable if I wanted to graduate law school, but the anxiety was overwhelming...
You may be thinking: What does this have to do with the 3-act structure, Mary?
Good question. Let’s come back to it!
Last week, I broke down the 3-act structure, a simple and powerful way to tell your story.
Today, it’s time to tackle Act 1 (cue brass fanfare).
Most importantly, name a problem
In every story, there’s a problem. The problem may not be apparent on page 1, but it becomes apparent by the end of the first third of the story—so apparent, that your main character has to do something about it.
The first step of implementing the 3-act structure is to figure out what the big problem in your story is.
Stories (interesting ones, anyway) are centered around a conflict. Whether internal or external, something is not going right for your characters.
In the story about law school that I’ve just begun telling you, I’ve introduced a problem: my insecurity.
Let’s take a look at some famous examples of 3-act structure stories and their problems that arise in Act 1:
In the classic Little Women, we meet a quaint little family living in Massachusetts during the Civil War—a mother and four daughters. Their father is a chaplain serving in the military and not home. Apart from the fact that they don’t have a lot of money, things proceed pretty well until they get the news that their father is sick and in the hospital, right near the end of Act 1.
In the contemporary novel Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, we meet two families whose lives have just intersected when the Warrens, Mia (the mother) and Pearl (the daughter), arrive in a small community in Ohio and rent a house from the Richardsons. When Mia’s coworker at the Chinese restaurant where she gets a job reveals to her that her baby her missing, the problem has been introduced. The rest of Act 1 is building the world around that baby.
In The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, about adult twin sisters Desiree and Stella, we learn immediately that Desiree has no idea where Stella is and hasn’t since Stella fled as a teen, disappearing and never contacting her sister since. The rest of Act 1 is building the world around Stella’s mysterious whereabouts.
Finally, in Palm Beach, my novel that’s coming out in August, we meet Mickey and Rebecca, new parents who have recently escaped New York to live in Florida with their baby Sebastian. When Mickey gets a job working for a billionaire who Rebecca thinks is evil, the question is: what is his choice going to do to their marriage? A problem has been introduced.
A simple 3-step breakdown
Because we all love steps and simplicity, another way to think of Act 1 in the 3-act structure is a 3-step process:
Create a world
Name a problem in it
Aggravate that problem
Let’s return to my law school story (I know you’ve been dying to hear more) as an example of these steps.
1. Create a world
Law school, specifically a classroom full of people and thick books that weigh more than human heads. People who speak in long sentences with many adverbs and prepositional phrases. A professor in a suit.
2. Name a problem in it
There’s a student (me) who is too insecure to let herself succeed, too panicked to answer the professor in class, and absolutely certain that someone in the admissions department has made a huge mistake.
3. Aggravate that problem
I haven’t done this, yet. So let’s do it now…
My anxiety and insecurity got worse.
When friends and family would check in to see how school was going, I would tell them very assuredly that I wasn’t smart enough to be there, that I couldn’t keep up, and that I was going to fail.
My mom staged an intervention, convincing my aunt, a seasoned lawyer in Texas, to call me to tell me all of her own law school horror stories. The call made me feel better, but it didn’t leave me any more confident in my own ability to succeed.
I considered getting a tutor, but were there even law school tutors? Did those exist? The fact that I had never even heard of such a thing only made me feel more alienated.
And there you go: I’ve written an Act 1 in a 3-act structure with all three key elements.
What happens next?
I drop out of law school.
Nope, just kidding, but I’ll tell you the real rest of the story next week, when we talk about Act 2!
Now that you know how to think about Act 1 in a 3-act structure, spend this week noticing Act 1s in the stories that you consume.
Ask: What’s the problem? How does the writer establish it? When does the writer establish it?
Next week I’ll talk about tackling Act 2, the hardest (and usually longest) act to write, in my opinion.
And again, if you missed my overview of the 3-act structure in my last post, check it out here.
Happy writing!
