: Three Act Structure - How do I include it? I've been writing for four years without knowledge of the three act structure. When I discovered it about a year ago, I therefore had no room for

A note of caution: As stressed (many times) before, I do not think it is wise to "construct" a story according to any structure, however popular it might be. These structures are a great tool to diagnose problems of an existing story. They are useless, if you do not have a story that you can apply them to.

However, you say that you very strongly feel that your story lacks an Act II, i.e.: You are unhappy with your story. Time to dig out the Three-Act-Structure and unleash it.

Previous answers have focused on the story elements of Act II. Let me complement this view with an interpretation of the psychological significance of Act II. Hopefully, I will be able to convince you that Act II is indeed the centrepiece of any story and that it is pretty much impossible to write a story entirely missing an Act II. It is there, however short or insignificant or under-developed it might be. It is your job to identify it and modify it according to your needs.

Psychological significance of the Three-Act-Structure:

Act I: The protagonist realizes he is in (more or less desperate) need of change. In one way or the other, he commits to the change and sets out to achieve it.
Act II: The change is achieved. This usually incorporates some dramatic experience that helps to transform the protagonist. In the terminology of the Hero's Journey, the hero faces death and is reborn -- he sheds off some aspect of his old personality and acquires new personality traits. This sounds very dramatic, but not every Act II needs to be loud and scream: Look what a marvelous change is achieved here!
Act III: The change is consolidated. While Act II provided the change itself, the protagonist now proves that he incorporated the change into his personality and will be able to live his life according to it. Hero's Journey: He is "resurrected". (Note that, personally, I find Campbell's terminology confusing: The death theme is present in both Acts II and III, but the distinction between the "reborn" and "resurrection" parts of the story is not entirely intuitive when considering the pure terminology. But then, I never was religious and might simply lack a thorough understanding of what ressurection means in a religious context.)

That is: When interpreting the Hero's Journey in a psychological sense, what it boils down to is an elobarote description of how something changes. In my opinion, this is the very essence of storytelling: We do not tell stories about things that stay the same. We tell stories about change - about how the protagonist finds the power to rise up to an unsatisfactory or threatening situtaion and change it.

To answer your question: I do not think you are in any sense able to incorporate the Three-Act-Structure into a story -- because it is there, always. What you can do is this: Identify the element of your story that brings about the central change. Once you have done so, you can give it the emphasis it deserves.

A description of the Hero's Journey and a tentative psychological interpretation that I found very useful is provided by Vogler in his The Writer's Journey. However, as mentioned above, the rigid terminology of the Hero's Journey -- starting right there with the term "Hero" that I feel decidedly uncomfortable with -- sometimes obscures the actual significance of the stage.

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I think the key to building a second act is to focus on the function of a second act: To increase the emotional payoff of the ending.

Raise the stakes. This forces the character to keep going, and makes the reader more worried about failure.
Eliminate options. None of the easy options work. None of the merely difficult or painful options work. No, in order to solve the problem, the character must sacrifice something precious. Bring the character to the point of despair. Readers care when characters despair.
Deepen the dilemma. Show why the stakes matter to this character in particular, so that the character cannot walk away from the problem. Show how much the character values the very thing that (in the end) must be sacrificed, so that character struggles desperately to find any other solution. The dilemma makes us care about the character, so that the sacrifice feels more deeply satisfying.

One way to develop a second act: Try/fail cycles. In each cycle:

The character tries some plausible way to solve the problem.
As a result, things get worse.

Each cycle eliminates options, raises the stakes, and deepens the dilemma. This increases the emotional payoff of the third act.

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George Lucas describes a basic three act structure as introduce your characters, put them in the worst situation possible, and then get them out of trouble. This works well. it is not the only way to do it, but it is a good one to start with.

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To some extent it's not really possible to write a story without three acts. Unless it's only two sentences long it will always be possible for a reader to post-rationalise a beginning-middle-end structure onto your tale. But when writing, don't worry about it.

You don't need any acts in a short story. You are free to pick even the smallest atom of structure and explore your idea there.

The expectation is that a short story will be short, and readers will be happy, even grateful, for a story which gets to the heart of its idea quickly, and wraps up when the point has been made.

Suppose you were to have a really interesting idea for how to escape from handcuffs, you could construct a short story which starts with a villain embarking on a prematurely triumphant monologue, and end with that same villain's reaction when the hero appears at his neck with a hot poker.

Such a story spans just a small fraction of a traditional third act, but it would still be satisfying, and readers could still, if they wanted to, perceive it as a three act story.

Update

Following clarification of the question, here's some thoughts on adding a whole extra act to a completed story. I'm going to talk about movie scripts here, because I find structure to be far more visible in those.

If you feel your story lacks a middle act, it's probably because it lacks the story elements traditionally found in the middle act. If you're struggling to figure out what those elements are, you can try analysing other stories.

Try thinking of a familiar movie in the following way: strip out the middle act and try to make the plot make sense without that act. Here's an example using a story everyone's familiar with:

A young space farmer longs to leave his dull planet and join the Rebellion against the evil Empire. He meets two robots who happen to be on a mission on behalf of the rebellion. The robots lead the boy to a mentor who takes them all to a rebel base where the hero joins an attack on the Imperial space station.

Now try to imagine that movie got made, and the producers watched it and realised that, although it made perfect sense, it was dull, and empty: the hero just discovers a problem and goes directly to the source and solves it. It just doesn't feel like a full story. And suppose, to fix this, they went away and filmed a second act to fill the gap. What processes would they have had to go through to concoct that second act?

Instead of the boy going straight to the rebel base, his mentor takes him to a bar where they get in a fight, meet a ruthless space smuggler and get in another fight. They go where the mentor suggests but they find that place had been destroyed and many people killed. Then they get captured by some bad guys, and they meet an idealist princess and sneak around trying to avoid more fights. Doing all of this raises the stakes (the mentor dies), introduces different approaches to consider (selfish / idealistic) but it also teaches the hero the skills and confidence for his later battle.

For yourself, pick a familiar story in your genre. Strip out the second act, smooth over the join and see what the story would look like. Note how relatively easy it can be to make that shortened story make sense, but note also how it loses its heart, soul or purpose. If your story has the same shortcomings, then yes, you are missing an act. Now you already have the answer for what that writer would have had to do to add a second act. Take inspiration from that.

You'll probably find, in many stories that you analyse, the second act is about punishing the hero's (and reader's) naivety or misconceptions, and teaching him/her a more effective response to the story's main problem, but also giving him/her alternative choices to consider. You may find it quite easy, since without a second act your hero may be walking into 'battle' fully equipped and prepared, which is boring. For your new second act you would take that preparedness, analyse it, strip to down to nothing, show the wrong-headedness of it, and build it up again into the potential for something better or something worse. (It's only a potential, because the third act is where we finally discover if the hero can realise that potential.)

That's only a taster. You can read up on it all over the place, but the above is a technique I've used in your situation to help me clearly grasp what the second act is about.

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There are exceptions to the rule of a three act structure, and a short story is often one of them. In your case, your story may be a "two act" rather than "three act" play.

If that's the appropriate format for your plot, from opening to climax, leave it that way.

I'm coming back to this answer two years later, but "better late than never."

In a three act play, there is a crisis at the beginning, a resolution at the end, and a long middle period of post-crisis/pre-resolution, as the characters pick up the pieces of the crisis.

In a short story, you can have a two act structure if the crisis and the resolution are the key events, and how you get from one to the other almost doesn't matter. In O. Henry's "Gift of the Magii," the crisis is that the husband and wife are too poor to buy each other the Christmas gifts they want to. The resolution is that each sells their prized asset to raise the money. (The husband sells his watch to buy his wife combs for her hair; the wife sells her hair to buy a watchchain for her husband. The actual buying and selling can be unimportant.) So this story lends itself well to a two-act structure.

If you want a three act structure, you have to "fill out" the middle. Then you show the respective bargaining of husband and wife for the selling of the watch and hair respectively, and the bargaining of their purchases of the watch chain and combs. Perhaps one or both will have a "near-miss" with "not enough money" even after selling their prized possessions. That creates the middle (third) act of the story.

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Trust your story.

Short stories in general--and very short stories in particular--often have no middle.

Treat the three-act structure (or any of the zillions of other popular structures) as tools for diagnosing story problem. If the story has a problems, a story structure can help you figure out where the problem is. If the story doesn't have a problem, there's no need to fit any given structure, no matter how popular or "universal."

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