• #2

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Once you’ve come up with a list of meaningful plot points that should happen in your story, and you have determined the general structure, you could strengthen the scaffolding further by relying on a five-act structure. The original three-act structure suffers from issues regarding the second act, which is the bulk of the story yet it’s treated as if it were the same length as the first and third acts. The five-act structure divides the second act into three, relying on a mid-story turning point as the main mast of the tale.

The following list of notions strives to strengthen the first act of a five-act structure.

• What is the goal in this act that the main charactes believes that by achieving it he’ll get closer to achieving his external goal?
• How does the main character’s external goal bend to his internal issue, the thing he struggles with that keeps him from easily achieving said goal without breaking a sweat?
• For every goal in an act (or scene), see which goals could fail first. That ups the conflict.
• One way to tell if what the protagonist wants in the beginning is her genuine goal is to ask yourself: will she have to face her biggest fear, and so resolve her inner issue, to achieve said goal?
• Look at every single character in your story and ask, “What’s their goal at this very moment?” If they don’t have one, give them one.
• List the actions your hero will take toward his goal.
• Create a plan that requires the hero to take a number of actions, but also to adjust when the initial plan doesn’t work. How is the plan unique and complex enough that the hero will have to adjust when it fails?
• As a general rule: whatever the protagonist tries, his first two attempts must be futile.
• How is this act an unit of action bound by a character’s desire?
• How does this act fulfill its purpose of preparing the readers for what’s in store?
• How do you bring with your important characters, as you introduce them, the stakes, what they care about, and the antagonistic forces that threaten what they care about.
• How do you take the time to introduce the character in his “normal world” before the inciting event comes blasting into view?
• How does this act represent the phase of the universal story that is Comfort and Separation?
• In the beginning quarter of the story, get the front story going first by hooking readers and audiences with present moment-to-moment conflict. The protagonist faces an immediate dilemma, experiences a loss, feels fear, and is compelled to take action.
• The first act sets up the story: the story problem, the story question, and the motivation for the protagonist to take action.
• Is there a hint of the consequences of failing the act’s goal, a mirror or echo of the kind of death he risks (physical, psychological, social, or a mix)?
• How does this act mirror and echo act five (the traditional third act)?
• How do the actions in this act prompt readers to ask “what is the worst consequence of this decision”, and the consequences will be shown in the second half of this story?
• How do you set up the stakes and the opposition for the desire line?
• All the scenes in this act should be contributing toward that First Plot Point moment: revealing backstory, giving it stakes, infusing it with tension and fear and anticipation.
• The mission of these act one scenes is clear: Make us feel like we’re there (vicarious experience), so that we see dynamics that the characters cannot. The characters feel them—and you can certainly make that feeling visceral—but for them it isn’t a story yet, it’s just their lives.
• The mission of this opening quartile is to invest the reader in the story through empathy for the hero, which depends on the establishment of stakes and a clearly defined dramatic question at the heart of the story.
• The scenes within each act should align contextually with that mission and thus bear a different context than scenes from the other parts. That’s critical to understand—it’s the difference between a writer who knows what she’s doing and one who is faking it or imitating what she’s read and mislabeling it as knowing how to write.
• Every single scene before your First Plot Point should contribute to the setup of the dynamic in the second act and forward, either through foreshadowing, hero backstory and present context, the establishment of stakes, or the ramp-up to the First Plot Point story turn.
• To set up the “Normal World,” not only focus on the existence and archetypical role of the protagonist, but also in the relationships he maintains, and especially in how those relationships are going to be altered or cut off when moving into the second act.
• Act 1 introduces your hero then throws a problem at him.  That problem will propel him into the heart of your story.
• Does the hero hesitate to engage with the story problem until the stakes are raised?
• Make sure the order of the events creates a gauntlet of challenge, baptism by escalating fire.
• Since story, both internally and externally, revolves around whether the protagonist achieves his goal, each turn of the cause-and-effect wheel, large and small, must bring him closer to the answer. How? By relentlessly winnowing away everything that stands in his way, legitimate reasons and far-fetched rationalizations alike, until the clock runs down to “now or never”.