Journal logo

Three Act Structure Is World’s Dumbest Writing Advice

Don’t care if Aristotle said it, don’t care if your English teacher did too

By Amethyst QuPublished 2 years ago 3 min read
1
All images in this story created using my own photos

Ever so often, a Twitter or Discord thread gets started on the topic of, “What’s the dumbest writing advice you’ve ever heard?”

Boy, oh boy, does that open the floodgates. As most writers and would-be writers already know, there's a whole lot of dumb out there when it comes to writing advice.

However, at the moment, I’ve been thinking a lot about an especially dumb kind of dumb — all that irritating nonsense about structure.

You see, I’ve arrived at a sticky place in the plotting of my most popular Kindle Vella novel, known to readers of my How to Vella experiment as Unfinished Novel #1. Unfinished it may be, but I’ve already earned close to $600 just for uploading it onto the Kindle Vella serial publishing platform, and hardly anybody’s even reading anything there, so I figure it’s got real potential in ebook where I actually have readers.

So, um, now I’ve got to finish it.

Quick note about writing for Vella

If you’re not caught up with that project, here’s a very long and detailed teardown of how I’m making money on Amazon US’s Kindle Vella, what types of serials I’m publishing, and how you can do it too if you think it’s worth the angst.

To sum up quickly, Kindle Vella requires you to submit ORIGINAL, never-before-published material to their platform. You can’t retread and recycle your old e̶x̶p̶l̶e̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶l̶e̶t̶e̶d̶ from around the internet.

So, to test Vella out and see if earning bonuses was as easy as people said, I found an old unfinished novel that never got published because… well… it never got finished.

I figured if it started to make any money in the serial format, I’d find a way to finish it.

Well, it’s making a little, so… now my bluff has been called, and I’ve got to come up with the thrilling conclusion.

This brings us back around to the whole subject of how-to-write advice that is a complete and total waste of your time and mine.

Three Act Structure

When I was a freshman in high school, our English teacher proudly informed us that Aristotle or maybe it was Sophocles said that a story had three acts.

Act One: How It Began.

Act Two: A Lot of Stuff Happens.

Act Three: Everybody Dies Or At Least Horribly Maims Themselves. The End.

I paraphrase. It was a long time ago. But you get the idea.

Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Snoozing owl in a log photographed by me in Madagascar 2007

I wasn’t an English major, so I might have gone on forever thinking it was just that one lady who was all kinds of Captain Obvious. But later on, I became a writer, and I realized she didn’t make this up all by herself.

All over the world, and now all over the virtual universe too, writing “teachers” are breathlessly informing people that stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Sometimes, there’s a four-act structure, because the middle part has “rising action” and “falling action.”

Whatever.

May we agree that this is a classic example of using a lot of words to say something that is completely, utterly, amazingly useless? Having been informed that everything (not just story, by the way) has a beginning, a middle, and an end, do we know anything we didn’t know before?

Are we able to take any action we didn’t take before?

Have we got any new insights we couldn’t have seen before?

I’m gonna vote nah.

Green Heron photographed Fort Morgan, Alabama 2012

Stop filling out beat sheets, start writing

I know. People have made whole careers out of teaching other people how to fill in cookie-cutter beat sheets and write cookie-cutter stories so we can fill the theaters full of cookie-cutter movies about the same-ole same-ole hero’s journey…

Well. Teachers gotta eat too.

Also, studying that stuff is a lot of fun. Plus, it gives you an excuse to procrastinate. You’re studying, after all! What could be nobler?

(Psst. While you’re procrastinating, don’t miss the silly captions on my silly pictures. Because I like to procrastinate too, and Photoshop is a great place to do that.)

But, alas, Unfinished Novel #1 is never going to have an ending if I keep reading other people’s advice about resolutions or redemption or how everybody dying horribly at the end is so 1602…

So let’s reach a conclusion, AKA an ending.

What’s the real dumbest writing advice?

The advice you’re reading right now instead of writing your book.

.

Note: This story was originally published on Medium, which is currently hosting a whole series about writing for Kindle Vella.

literature
1

About the Creator

Amethyst Qu

Seeker, traveler, birder, crystal collector, photographer. I sometimes visit the mysterious side of life. Author of "The Moldavite Message" and "Crystal Magick, Meditation, and Manifestation."

https://linktr.ee/amethystqu

Reader insights

Nice work

Very well written. Keep up the good work!

Top insight

  1. On-point and relevant

    Writing reflected the title & theme

Add your insights

Comments

Amethyst Qu is not accepting comments at the moment

Want to show your support? Send them a one-off tip.

Find us on social media

Miscellaneous links

  • Explore
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use
  • Support

© 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.