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    The Three-Act Writing Structure
    The Three-Act Writing Structure
    The Three-Act Writing Structure
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    The Three-Act Writing Structure

    By Mark E Tyson

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    About this ebook

    Preparing to write a novel or a novella can be daunting. Whether you’re a writer who makes up the story as you go along (a pantser) or you’re someone who plans out your plot, or you’re hybrid of both, one aspect of the process remains the same; the book must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Writing within the Three-Act Writing Structure can help. By mastering the Three-Act structure or the Five-Act structure, you can rest assured your readers will be satisfied when they read the final few pages of your book. One of the biggest mistakes a writer makes is not having a well-placed middle for their novel or novella. This book explains the Three-Act structure in detail.

    I have also gathered up useful information I think will benefit the novella and novel writer specifically. Such as not only how to write dialogue but also how to correctly punctuate it. How to get around common point of view issues, and how to write believable, memorable characters plus much, much more.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherShadesilver Publishing
    Release dateMay 23, 2017
    ISBN9781386672043
    The Three-Act Writing Structure

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      Book preview

      The Three-Act Writing Structure - Mark E Tyson

      Introduction

      THIS BOOK IS FOR PEOPLE who want to write novels for publication. Much of the information herein will also benefit those who wish to write screenplays, teleplays, three-act plays, five-act plays, novellas, and other written modes of storytelling. Reading this book is not a guarantee of publication or adulation, but it might help get you get closer to that end. Knowledge is power, and power is the ability to use knowledge effectively.

      How to use this book: I have written this book to be a guide on conceiving, plotting, writing, and producing a salable creative writing product. To that end, each writer may be at a different level of development. I encourage you to read the entire book, but it won’t hurt my feelings if you just take from it what you need. There are a few exercises at the end of many of the chapters to help you master the concepts you might be weakest at understanding.

      Credentials: I earned my Bachelor of Arts degree in English/Literature from New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, New York, and my Master of Arts degree in English/Literature from National University in San Diego, California. I taught writing and English in private and public high schools for ten years before I began writing full time.

      Objective of this book: When I socialize with friends, someone inevitably will say to me that they have always wanted to write a novel but never got around to getting one started, or they didn’t know where to start, or they wrote X number of pages and bogged down and stopped and never picked it back up again. So, I got to thinking and it occurred to me that since I used to be an English teacher, and I am a novelist now doesn’t mean I have to completely stop teaching! In fact, I can really help those people at the party who started their great novels and then bogged down and stopped. I bet I can guess what went wrong without even looking at their work. Then it also occurred to me that I could write it all down to benefit potential authors!

      I am a member of Kboards (formerly Kindle Boards), and I noticed a lot of new writers were asking veteran writers about getting stuck and their frustration at writing too slow to cash in on swift sales with Kindle Direct Publishing, Apple iBooks, etc. The veterans often commented that it was probably because the newer members had good ideas and started their novels only to stop writing somewhere in the middle. Here is where I come in with this book. It’s time to learn how to effectively write a manuscript with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

      I also want to help those authors who might already have a book written and maybe even published, but the book’s not doing anything financially. I am going to explain the three-act story and the five-act story structure in detail.. I will explain how to outline your project simply and efficiently using either the three-act or the five-act structure. (I also have a plan for those who write by the seat of their pants—pantsers!) I will go into the meat and potatoes of sentence structure, writing and punctuating dialogue, and story elements, like plot, scene, etc. I will explain to you what show don’t tell really means and how to do it.

      Once again, I organized this book into what I thought was most important for a new writer to learn first, and I moved forward from there. More advanced writers might find it useful to skip ahead or skim to the parts of the book they find most useful. Like any how-to book, one gets what they need out of it and just skims over what they already know, and that’s perfectly all right. Remember, there is no one definitive guide on how to write a bestseller. I encourage you to read and research every available source.

      Let us begin . . .

      Part 1: Building Blocks

      BEFORE WE CAN TALK about how to follow the three-act writing structure and put together a writing project, we have to discuss the building blocks. In order to build any structure, literally or figuratively, you have to have a strong foundation, or the project will fall and fail. I once had a writing student tell me you didn’t need to have a clean, well-edited manuscript to submit to publishers or to self-publish. Cleaning up the writing is the editor’s job— it’s what you pay them for if you self-publish, and it’s what the publishing houses pay them for if you publish your novel the traditional way. I asked him if he would buy a car that didn’t run. It’s a mechanic’s job to make a car run after you buy it, right? You can purchase just any old car and submit it to the mechanic or pay the mechanic to fix it. Of course, he thought I was being ridiculous. It’s not the same thing at all. Oh, really? Then why on earth would a publisher buy a manuscript full of mistakes and errors if they had to give it to someone to fix before they could move forward with it? Sure, there may be exceptions, just like there are certain cars that fixing would be worth it, but it better be a special or valuable car, and likewise, it better be one heck of a manuscript! In either case, it’s a longshot.

      There are a few things that might be helpful to learn and master before we delve into plot and structure. For the writing projects that the three-act writing structure is most useful for, the building blocks are in no particular order—mastering point of view, mastering using and punctuating dialogue, plotting with beats,

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