Alternatives to the Three-Act Structure

The Three-Act arc you were most likely taught in english class back in grade school. 

For many, the three-act structure has become an unquestioned paradigm, an a priori of writing. You probably had to study that diagram above for an assignment once, and fill out the blanks of it on a test. Here's what they didn't teach you: That image up there? Completely arbitrary. Someone's opinion.


It isn't really the way that all stories have always been told, and it isn't even always the way that we tell the stories today. The Iliad, one of the west's oldest stories, doesn't follow a three-act structure. It starts in the ninth year of a ten-year war and then the readers can only piece together how they got there much later. It's as though we start towards the climax. The Odyssey is an even better example: It starts with Telemachus being asked by Athena to search for his missing father, and then we eventually backtrack to Odysseus. In that case we start at the end and work our way to the beginning.

Really, your average two-hour movie does this as well: there are no intermissions or breaks. There is just one continuous act-less event (the movie) centred around a problem or a conflict. A good made-for-tv movie might have around seven acts if there are seven commercial breaks. After all, there needs to be something exciting at the end of each act to give the audience something to look forward to as they told to buy useless products.

The truth is, in real life stories have all kinds of structures. They can work backwards - like  Momento which progresses from an end, to a middle, and concludes with the beginning. Or they can go on and on - like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake which ends in the middle of the first sentence in the first chapter, making the narrative an infinite loop. Or they can be jumbled, like most Tarantino films.

So evidently the three-act structure is not the only way to tell a story. There is no reason to be limited in this idea that a story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. 

Creativity has no structure. Creators should create structures to suit there stories, not the other way around. After all, real life has no structure.