Story Building Mastery 2 – Five Act Structure

Five Act Structure RETURN TO MENU ARTICLE We’ll soon be getting into some familiar territory. If you’ve had any creative writing study at all in high school, then you’ve at least heard about the Five Act Structure. Those of you who are more experienced with writing will have a fairly decent grasp of how the Five Act Structure works. The Five Act Structure is a way to describe the basic development of any story. In Level 1 we talked about the focus or main core with which the story will be developed. Here we’ll look at how the story is broken down into definable sections. There’s nothing mystical about this, but every story pretty much follows the Five Act Structure. Because it’s fundamentally the way story telling has developed through all the centuries that story telling has existed. Let’s look at each Act and I’ll describe what they’re getting at.