Writing Tip: When 3-Act Structure is 4-Act Structure

“Per Aristotle, while we may still think of a story having three acts — Beginning, Middle, End — at a psychological level in the narrative Internal World, there is a four-act structure at work.”

At a Willamette Writers Conference in Portland, Oregon during which I gave four presentations, I also moderated a keynote Q&A with novelist and screenwriter Peter Craig. During Peter’s session ‘From Prose to Screenwriting,’ he noted that he thinks feature length screenplay structure is best thought of as four acts, not just three, dividing up the middle into Act Two A and Act Two B.

I heard the same thing a year ago at a session Aline Brosh McKenna had with the Black List Feature Writer’s Lab in association with Women In Film: “Screenplays are four acts.”

This aligns with the way I’ve been teaching screenplay structure for well over a decade in my Prep: From Concept to Outline workshops. In that course, I ask writers to think of a screenplay universe as consisting of two story worlds:

Plotline: External World — Action / Dialogue — Physical Journey
Themeline: Internal World — Intention / Subtext — Psychological Journey

In every scene, every moment, whenever something happens in the External World, something else happens in the Internal World.

How does this relate to Four Act Structure?

In the Themeline, that’s where we can track the Protagonist’s psychological metamorphosis, what in Hollywood is commonly referred to as their arc. In most movies, that arc is a positive one and can be looked at in four movements:

Disunity — — — — Deconstruction — — — — Reconstruction — — — — Unity

At the story’s beginning, the Protagonist is living in their ordinary world, a place they have inhabited for some time, what writers refer to as ‘backstory.’ The Protagonist has developed habits and attitudes, they have a personal history and their own distinctive world view, but from a writer’s perspective and in almost all cases, the story would not be worth telling were it not for this simple fact: the Protagonist is going to change, they need to change. Hence, movement — psychological, emotional, spiritual — is implied in a story from the very beginning.

Sometimes the Protagonist is conscious of their desire for change, other times, they are unaware of it. However in almost every story, the Protagonist starts off in a state of Disunity: they are living their life one way, when they should be living it differently. Their overall journey is from an inauthentic existence to an authentic one.

Something happens which propels the Protagonist out of the ordinary world, thrusting them into what Joseph Campbell calls the “world of adventure.” At first, the Protagonist is a stranger in a strange land — new faces, places, rules. They try using the methods they have learned in the ordinary world, but they find their old ways don’t cut it in this new environment, the flow of events going against them, putting the Protagonist on their heels. The onslaught of events batters the Protagonist, physically, psychologically, or both, and causes them to start abandoning their old ways of being, coping mechanisms, and learned behaviors. Although this may be experienced as a negative, the effect of these events allows the Protagonist to get in touch with their authentic nature which has been lying dormant in the character’s unconscious. We call this movement Deconstruction.

Something significant happens around the story’s midpoint (Transition) where the Protagonist finally sets aside their old behaviors, relying more and more on what they are discovering within their Self. As they do, they usually release a heretofore untapped reservoir of innate power, previously repressed in their old way of living. Events happen which test them and give the Protagonist opportunities to practice using their newfound power and knowledge. As a result, the flow shifts, not so much events against the Protagonist causing them to react, but rather the Protagonist becoming proactive. We call this movement Reconstruction.

A story usually culminates in a big test to determine if what the Protagonist has learned along the way has taken hold or not. If the Protagonist succeeds in this Final Struggle, typically against a Nemesis, they do so in large part because of the merging of the their want and need, resulting in their end state: Unity.

Per Aristotle, while we may still think of a story having three acts — Beginning, Middle, End — at a psychological level in the narrative Internal World, there is a four-act structure at work.

Takeaway: Think of the events of the Plotline as serving and supporting the Protagonist’s journey. Even the characters with whom the Protagonist intersects are tethered to and impact the story’s central character and their transformation arc. And that journey can be seen to have four movements: Disunity — Deconstruction — Reconstruction — Unity.