: Re: 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

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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