: 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

@Lee1909368

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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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