(LESSON 1.1) The Key to Figuring Out a First-Act Break for Your Story (Even When Your Plot Is Really Complex)
Lesson 1.1
The Key to Figuring Out a First-Act Break for Your Story (Even When Your Plot Is Really Complex)
What’s the first-act break?
Basically, it’s what it sounds like. It’s an invisible boundary between the beginning, or Act One of your story, and its middle (a.k.a. Act Two).
Theater seats by Lloyd Dirk (https://unsplash.com/photos/4SLz_RCk6kQ)
In practical terms, this means that your first act break is a combination of the last event from Act One and the first event from Act Two. Together, these events equate to your protagonist taking a solid step toward achieving his goal.
Theater seats by Lloyd Dirk (https://unsplash.com/photos/4SLz_RCk6kQ); Sneaker icon by Oxygenna (http://www.oxygenna.com)
To figure out the first-act break of your story, you need to know two things:
- your protagonist’s goal
- your story’s central hook
Let’s start with the first item, your protagonist’s goal. What is he going after? What is he pursuing? This goal is what the plot of your story will be built upon.
If your story has several complex aspects (which happens a lot with science-fiction and high fantasy), it may feel overwhelming to come up with the step that your protagonist will take right around the first-act break.
If you do feel overwhelmed, don’t think about all of these complexities. Instead, try to reduce your protagonist’s goal to an infinitive.
Then, think about an action (perhaps a “bite-sized” step) that’s connected to this verb form. This will be the foundation of your first-act break.
In Writing Screenplays That Sell, Michael Hauge argues that all plots for commercial stories can be summarized by the following five infinitives:
- to stop
- to win
- to deliver
- to retrieve
- to escape
If you’re having a hard time reducing your plot to an infinitive, use one of these as a starting point.
For example, in the novel Divergent by Veronica Roth, society is divided into five factions:
- Dauntless
- Candor
- Erudite
- Amity
- Abnegation
Then there are the people without a faction (the factionless), and the people who could belong to multiple factions (the divergent).
Assorted icons by icon monstr (http://iconmonstr.com)
If you were writing a story like this one, it’d be very easy to get so sidetracked by all of these factions, that you’d lose sight of your story’s structure. But you could get back on track by focusing on your protagonist’s goal.
In this case, it’s to survive Dauntless training.
When you focus on that, all the distractions that come from the faction system fade away, and you can determine a potential first-act break for your story: a step that would take the protagonist closer to passing training.
(By the way, this—i.e. “boiling down” your plot to an infinitive—is a simple but effective technique to help you summarize a complex plot in a book description or query letter.)
Try it out for yourself in the writing exercise below!
Writing Exercise: Simplify This
To complete this exercise, use pages 6–8 of your Three-Act Structure Workbook.
In your workbook, you’ll find summaries for the following four stories:
- To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han
- Total Recall (1990)
- The Devil Wears Prada (film adaptation)
- Batman Begins
Each summary is loaded with backstory, worldbuilding elements, and other details. “Boil down” each plot to a single infinitive.
To + __________________________
* * *
As previously discussed in this lesson, you need to know two things in order to figure out the first-act break of your story:
(1) your protagonist’s goal
(2) your story’s central hook
Sneaker icon by Oxygenna (http://www.oxygenna.com); Hook icon by icon monstr (http://iconmonstr.com)
We already talked about the former. Now let’s talk about the latter, i.e. the hook.
We’ll dive into the details in the video below. Click play to start!