One of the central lessons I learned back when I was still attempting to become a screenwriter as well as a fiction writer (something I’ve discussed on this blog a few times before) was that of the three-act structure, a narrative model that was so fundamental to screenwriting that many of my teachers claimed it was invented by Aristotle (in reality, all Aristotle said was that every tragedy should have a beginning, middle, and end, and it was actually famous screenwriting teacher Syd Field who articulated the paradigm).
Whatever its origins, though, it’s clear that the three-act structure is an effective way of describing contemporary narratives. According to the model, Act One, the first quarter of the story, begins by detailing all the necessary exposition and then introduces the inciting incident (which I’ve discussed in detail in a blog post before) that sets the plot in motion. Act Two, then, covers the second and third quarters of the story and features various conflicts, obstacles, roadblocks, etc. and ends with some new incident that raises the stakes. Finally, Act Three covers the last quarter of the story and features a climax in which the hero either wins or loses but either way learns something valuable (I’ve discussed what makes a good ending in detail in a previous blog post). Essentially, the model is a variation on Gustav Freytag’s pyramid of dramatic structure, and a pared down version of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey.
Now, most literary fiction writers look down on the three-act structure as an uninspired and limiting narrative model, and perhaps rightfully so. After all, following the paradigm literally can produce some very bland narratives, nothing more than beat by beat rewrites of the basic plot of Star Wars. But I want to argue that there is something valuable that literary fiction writers can gain from the three-act structure: it may not be a model that we should force our narratives to conform to, and we should obviously write complex and experimental narratives that challenge such a traditional form, but inevitably, certain arcs of our narratives, even the most experimental ones, will end up reflecting the basic three-act structure—because buried within the awkward specifics of the model, behind the words “inciting incident” and “midpoint” and “plot point one” and “plot point two,” is a natural emotional arc that reflects the way our central characters often change. Even literary fiction, after all, which isn’t often invested in plot or action, is almost always interested in character, and often in characters who change over time. In many cases, these changes reflect the ups and downs of the three-act structure—in Act One the character commits themselves to something new, in Act Two they struggle emotionally and suffer setbacks, and in Act Three they reach an emotional climax and, whether they succeed or fail, achieve a new understanding of themselves, the world, life, etc. It’s simply Aristotle’s idea of the beginning, middle, and end, but applied to character arcs.
Even in novels in which the character defiantly doesn’t change, I’d argue that the three-act structure can still reflect a novel’s emotional arc—only this time, it’s the reader, not the character, who experiences the emotional ups and downs of Acts One, Two, and Three. Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Against Nature, often described as a novel without a plot, follows misanthropic aesthete Jean des Esseintes as he secludes himself in his home to escape contemporary society. The novel itself doesn’t really have a narrative, and each chapter is just a description of a different part of his house, his library, his Moreau paintings, his collection of perfumes—but even still, I’d argue that a reader’s experience follows the three-act structure, moving from curiosity to fascination to horror to pity as we go deeper and deeper into the protagonist’s decadent world. The story may not have a traditional beginning, middle, and end, but our experience reading it certainly does.
One of the more interesting examples of the three-act structure as applied to literary fiction is Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (2017). The novel is divided into three distinct parts that appear to largely mirror the three-act structure: Book I, Gohyang/Hometown, 1910-1033, Book II, Motherland, 1939-1962, and Book III, Pachinko, 1962-1989. But because the novel is a multigenerational family saga, no one central character has an emotional arc that corresponds to a classic beginning, middle, and end. Instead, the emotional arc that in other works of literary fiction would be centered on one character is in this novel diffused across three different generations of characters: in Book I, it is Sunja, a girl born in poverty in Japanese-occupied Korea, who experiences the traditional Act One plot points, including an inciting incident that leads her into a marriage and a journey to Japan, where the majority of the novel is set; in Book II, though, it is Sunja’s children, Noa and Mozasu, who experience the obstacles and setbacks characteristic of Act Two, the struggles of finding their way in a country that doesn’t fully accept them; and finally in Act Three, it is Mozasu’s son Solomon who reaches the novel’s climactic emotional understanding about his identity, the culmination of the journey that began two generations earlier with Sunja. It’s an incredible literary feat, diffusing the three-act structure across three generations of a family, but it works so well and gives the sprawling novel its central structure. It also ultimately provides a wonderful metacommentary on the nature of the multigenerational novel, by linking the different generations through a single emotional arc.
Thus, as with endings and beginnings, the seemingly rigid rules of screenwriting actually have lessons for literary fiction writers willing to look more closely and critically. And I’d argue that this is ultimately true of every writing rule: our natural experimental impulses may lead us to reject any attempt at prescriptive storytelling—but sometimes our most interesting literary experiments come not from rejecting a rule completely but from using its elements selectively to suit our larger purpose.