Three-act structure for screenwriters

A beginning, a middle and an end

The idea is far older than film. In the Poetics, Aristotle says that a whole action has a beginning, a middle and an end, and he defines each part by its neighbours: a beginning needs nothing before it, an end needs nothing after it, and a middle has something on both sides. He was writing about Athenian tragedy, but the three parts have stayed with storytellers ever since.

The page counts came from Syd Field. In Screenplay (1979), drawing on years of reading scripts for a production company, he described what he called the paradigm. Act One is the set-up, Act Two the confrontation and Act Three the resolution, and a plot point at the end of each of the first two acts turns the story into the next. For a 120-page script he put the first plot point around pages 25 to 30 and the second around pages 85 to 90, which leaves two outer acts of about thirty pages and a middle act of about sixty.

Field later added a midpoint, a turn halfway through the second act. Most of the methods that followed borrow his diagram in some form, including the fifteen beats on our beat sheet page.

What each act does

An act is a stretch of story that ends with a change big enough that the story can't go back to how it was. Each of the three has its own work to do.

Act One introduces the main character, the world they live in, and what is missing or wrong in it. Then something upsets that world, and by the end of the act the character has committed to a course they can't easily abandon. The audience should come out of it knowing the question the film will answer, such as whether the detective catches the killer before he strikes again.

Act Two is where the character goes after what they want and meets opposition that grows each time they push. It runs to about half the script and gives writers the most trouble. Somewhere near the middle the ground shifts under them, and by the end of the act the plan they started with has failed or been shown up.

Act Three answers the question. Cornered, the character makes a last attempt, drawing on what the second act forced them to learn, and the confrontation the film has been heading towards takes place. A short resolution shows the world afterwards, and what it cost to get there.

The turning points

Five moments hold the structure up. Teachers name them differently, and the positions in brackets are rough shares of the script.

1. Inciting incident (about a tenth of the way in). The event that disturbs the character's life and starts the story moving. It usually happens to them before they have decided anything, and it raises the question the climax will settle.
2. First plot point (about a quarter). The end of Act One. The character decides, or is pushed, and the story heads somewhere it can't return from. A decision reads more strongly here than an accident, because it makes the character answerable for what follows.
3. Midpoint (halfway). Something is won, lost or found out that changes what the second half is about. Often the character stops reacting and starts to act, or a private problem goes public.
4. Second plot point (about three quarters). The end of Act Two, at or just after the character's lowest moment, when the plan has collapsed. The low point and the decision that leads out of it are sometimes separate scenes, a few pages apart.
5. Climax (near the end). The confrontation the film has been promising. The question raised by the inciting incident gets its answer, which can be yes, no, or something the character didn't expect to want.

Smaller turns happen all through a script. The two at the act breaks matter most, because each one changes what the character is trying to do.

Keeping the long second act alive

Sixty pages is a long way to travel on one goal, and many drafts sag around page 50. The character keeps trying the same thing, or waits for something to happen, and scenes repeat what earlier scenes already established. Writers use a handful of methods to hold it up.

• Split it at the midpoint. Treat the act as two halves of about thirty pages, often called 2A and 2B. A common pattern is a first half that goes broadly well for the character and a second half in which the bill arrives.
• Think in sequences. Frank Daniel, who taught screenwriting at Columbia and the University of Southern California, broke features into sequences of roughly ten to fifteen pages, each with a small goal and a tension of its own. Paul Gulino, who learned the method from him, set it out in Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach (2004). A feature has about eight sequences, so the second act becomes four shorter stories to write.
• Make every attempt cost more. More risk, more exposure, a friendship damaged. If two scenes in a row could swap places without anyone noticing, one of them probably isn't needed.
• Give the subplot weight. A second storyline, a relationship for instance, can carry the act while the main plot gathers itself, and it pays off best when the two storylines collide before the act is over.

How long each act runs

The usual proportions are a quarter, a half and a quarter. At about a minute a page, the table puts them into pages for the three most common feature lengths.

The turning points move with the length. These are rough ranges, rounded to whole pages.

Comedies and horror films often come in nearer 90 pages, and dramas nearer 110 or 120. In finished films the third act often runs short of a quarter, because once the climax starts the story moves fast.

A worked example: Low Tide

Low Tide, the sample project in Scriptopus, is a 12-page short drama. Mara Welles, a sound recordist, goes back to her late mother's cottage on the day it is sold and finds her father, Des, already there. They haven't spoken in thirteen years. The table divides it into three acts and gives each act a question of its own. Try doing the same for your own plan.

The acts come out at roughly three, six and two and a half pages, near enough the textbook quarter, half and quarter for a script this short. Each question is answered at the act break where the next one is raised. She stays, so we need to know what happened; she learns what happened, so we need to know what she will do about it. When a script feels like three separate films, the questions are usually not handing over to each other this way.

The low point and the second plot point are two pages apart. Between the tape and the microphone comes the porch step, where Mara takes in the news, and even those two pages let the audience feel the blow before the last act begins.

In ScriptopusThe Beat Board offers a choice of structures before you start, and Change, beside Structure at the top of the board, switches to another later. Pick Three-Act Structure and the board starts with a sequence for each of its eight stages, from Setup through the Inciting Incident, Act One Break, Midpoint, All Is Lost, Act Two Break and Climax to Resolution, and gives each sequence a share of the runtime you set. Story Canvas has the same stages in its Structure panel, which can lay them out across the board or place each one at its minute on a timeline. The Beat Board is part of the free plan.

Three acts and the fifteen beats

The fifteen beats on our beat sheet page fit inside the three acts. Snyder's Catalyst does the work of the inciting incident, and Break into Two is the first plot point. His Midpoint is the same moment under the same name. All Is Lost and the Dark Night of the Soul together make the low point, Break into Three is the second plot point, and the Finale is the third act.

The beats add detail between the turning points, such as a moment for the theme to be stated and an entrance for the B story. Many writers set the proportions with the acts, then turn to the beats for what each stretch should contain.

Five acts, and acts on television

Before Field, the theatre counted to five. The Roman poet Horace advised that a play should have five acts, no more and no fewer, and Renaissance playwrights followed him; Shakespeare's plays are still printed in five. In 1863 the German novelist Gustav Freytag drew the five-act play as a pyramid, climbing through the exposition and the rising action to a climax in the third act, then falling away to the catastrophe.

Lay five acts over three and they line up better than the numbers suggest. Freytag's climax sits where a screenwriter's midpoint does, and acts two, three and four together make the long second act. John Yorke makes the case for reading screen drama in five acts in Into the Woods (2013).

Television counts its acts by the advertising breaks. A US network drama of an hour usually opens with a teaser and runs four to six acts, each ending on a moment strong enough to bring viewers back. A network half-hour comedy tends to have a cold open, two or three acts and a short tag. Where there are no adverts, many scripts carry no act headings, though the writers still break each episode into movements that do the same work. Our guide to screenplay format shows how act breaks are marked on the page.

The case against three acts

Three-act structure has never been short of critics, several of them screenwriting teachers themselves.

• It describes almost anything. Any story with a beginning, a middle and an end can be drawn as three acts, so the model can say where the turns go while saying very little about what they should be.
• It works from the outside in. John Truby, in The Anatomy of Story (2007), argues that act breaks are laid over a story from outside, and builds his own method on the main character's development.
• It breeds sameness. Audiences learn the rhythm, and a turn that arrives on the expected minute can feel inevitable in the wrong way.
• Other traditions build differently. Kishōtenketsu, a four-part shape from Chinese and Japanese poetry, introduces, develops, turns and reconciles, and is often described as a way to build a story without a central conflict.

Most working writers settle somewhere between the believers and the sceptics. They use the three acts to check a draft's proportions and find where it sags, and reach for a different shape when the story asks for one, such as the hero's journey or Dan Harmon's story circle.

Download the three-act sheet

A planning sheet with the three acts and the five turning points, a page target beside each for 90, 110 and 120 pages, and a line for the question each act asks. The second page has the Low Tide example filled in.

Questions

Sources and further reading

1. Aristotle, Poetics, section 7, on a whole action with a beginning, a middle and an end.
2. Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (1979), for the paradigm and the two plot points.
3. Paul Joseph Gulino, Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach (2004).
4. Gustav Freytag, Die Technik des Dramas (1863), in English as Technique of the Drama.
5. John Yorke, Into the Woods (2013), on five-act structure in screen drama.
6. John Truby, The Anatomy of Story (2007).