What If Your Biggest Disaster Could Be Your Greatest Opportunity?
There is a lot more to be said about the Three-Act Structure, and I say quite a lot of it in my book How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method. I won’t try to cram in a whole book’s worth of thoughts in this blog post.
I’ll just make two points here about the Three-Act Structure:
- It’s punctuated with three disasters, placed roughly at the 25%, 50%, and 75% marks in the story.
- The reason for the placement of these disasters is that readers are expecting major psychological turning points at roughly these locations. So there’s not a lot wiggle room on these. If you tried to move these to (for example), the 1%, 5%, and 95% marks, the story would feel out of whack to your readers.
There is no rule that you can have only three bad things happen in a novel. Most novels have dozens or even hundreds of bad things happen to their characters (depending on how you count).
