: Re: Skipping the first act? In traditional story structure theory, the ACT 1 is made to set up the world and host the inciting incident, the ACT 2 is made for the main quest and sequence of

@Courtney562

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I think you're mixing up two things here: Story structure and plot.

"Acts" don't describe what happens in your story - they describe what purpose these parts of your story serve. "Plot" would be what happens in your story.

Plot vs. Story Structure

Traditionally, a story consists of a protagonist who wants something, then encounters a conflict (something's preventing him from getting what he wants), then makes several attempts at overcoming that conflict and eventually resolves the conflict in some way or another. If you want to follow this story structure, you need a few ingredients:

a protagonist
something that your protagonist wants
something that prevents your protagonist from getting what they want (the antagonistic force).

These two (what the protagonist wants and what opposes them) make up the conflict.

At the beginning of the story, you usually want to introduce your protagonist as well as what they want. As readers, we need to know this in order to understand the conflict. Plotwise, you can do this however you want: You can introduce your protagonist as he's attending his uncle's birthday, or you can introduce your protagonist as he's marching to Brea. But the structure is the same: The reader gets to know the protagonist as well as what he wants (to destroy the ring he inherited).

Skipping parts of plot vs. skipping parts of the structure

This is probably all common knowledge to you. What I'm trying to make clear is that sure, you can skip the plot and action you would traditionally put in the first act, but you're going to have a much harder time to skip the structure stuff you need to set up in the first act: Who's the protagonist, what do they want, why would we even care, what is opposing them?

Doing this setup in flashbacks is absolutely possible, although you might want to read up on the pitfalls that come with flashbacks (flashbacks can actually disrupt the story way more than a traditional first act with all its world setup would and make it way more boring).

I haven't seen Dunkirk but I'm pretty sure it didn't skip the first act. From what I read at Wikipedia, it seems to do all the neccessarry setup: Introduce the protagonist(s) (I'm guessing mostly Tommy), what he wants (to go back home) and why that's so hard. What might be confusing you here is that the "old world" is already a not so peaceful one: They are at war, soldiers are dying every day. Then comes the inciting event where they decide that evacuating from the beaches of France is neccessarry, which marks the shift to the "new world". I'm very certain the Act I stuff is all there, you just need to find it.

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