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<\/a><\/div>\nThe problem is that working on something serious, such as this blog, is almost inconceivable when in this altered state. I give it my best shot but at a certain point I\u2019m incapable of tasks such as research, assembling random facts into a coherent form, and most especially making it readable. So, while I had plans for the end of last week and the beginning of this week, I\u2019d forgotten that the whole country was going to dump one mighty fuckton of smoke into the atmosphere all at once.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/div>\nPoint is, plans change and instead of trying to tackle more African mythology<\/a> as part of the continuing Alternative Mythologies<\/a> series today, I\u2019ll be writing about one of the few things I could<\/b><\/i> think about in the last few days\u2026<\/p>\n Pacing is something that writers live and die on in this industry. Not everyone can agree on universal definitions for \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d stories, but what everyone can<\/b><\/i> agree on is that if you fuck up your pacing\u2026<\/p>\n A lot of the professional and semi-professionals I know out there stress about this constantly. But what really baffles me is that the curriculum for writing programs I\u2019m familiar with almost always approach pacing from the wrong direction<\/b><\/i>. The three act structure, for instance, is taught almost universally as this first step towards creating a coherent plot. The problem is, as many people eventually learn, sometimes three is the wrong number of acts. As one of my friends said off-handedly, \u201csometimes there\u2019s seven.\u201d<\/p>\n This creates a conflict for people who had been taught the three act structure as a sacred tenet of the writing profession. If you\u2019re told that every story must have three acts then when it comes time that you realize the three act structure doesn\u2019t exactly fit what you\u2019re writing – you\u2019re screwed.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s because the way we teach writing is backwards, you start to learn to put acts into your writing without people understanding how and why \u201cacts\u201d exist. Some people think it\u2019s an outline but it isn\u2019t, it\u2019s just that three acts happen to coincide perfectly with something that does<\/b><\/i> exist almost universally: logical progression (beginning, middle, and end). That brings us to the great problem: most people don\u2019t understand the basics of structure\u2026because they were taught a more sophisticated structure and told it was the basic one.<\/p>\n So let\u2019s take a look at some of the structural standards and why they aren\u2019t universal, starting with\u2026<\/p>\n This is often taught to everyone as the most basic structure of any story. The \u201cacts\u201d structure has been taught since the written word more or less, and everyone has this vague understanding of what it is. However, I challenge you now to define what an act is to yourself without being vague.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n That\u2019s the first mistake of teaching acts as the basic structure: \u201cacts\u201d aren\u2019t a tangible element outside of their origin. The first form of story telling was oral tradition, people would tell their stories in person and would preserve them by teaching them to the next generation who would then tell them to the generation to follow. Over time, this evolved, the stories beginning to involve props, costumes and multiple players. And this evolution eventually became a genre unto itself known as \u201cplays\u201d.<\/p>\n So as the written word formed, this ancient tradition gave birth to the first \u201cfiction writers\u201d: playwrights. The playwrights had a task ahead of them that was unique at the time. Most story sessions were short, discussing only a small event that could be told by a single person over the course of a few minutes to possibly an hour. But plays are more complicated – they require many moving parts and could last much longer than the short stories told around campfires in the past. So playwrights came up with a structure that helped them in multiple ways: acts.<\/p>\n The act, despite the vague notion it somehow associates directly with the concept of \u201cbeginning, middle, and end\u201d, is really a chunk of the play that exists between intermissions. Consider for a moment when you watch a play, the curtain falls and they stop the entire play for a period of time. Why do they do that? What could possibly the function of stopping the story in the middle of showing it?<\/p>\n Well the first function is a practical one that has existed since the dawn of human civilization: the audience gets antsy. Sitting for hours at a time in dead silence is not something we\u2019re actually wired for. In our modern day context, we have the ability to take these stories in while still being somewhat free to move or keep ourselves busy beyond watching someone else. Consider how often you leave a room while watching something in your daily life. Realize that you\u2019re not allowed to move, speak, or make noise which may disrupt the actors on stage. One moment of being distracting can ruin the entire thing for everyone. So somewhere, deep in our brains, a small primitive voice is yelling to us, \u201cWe gotta move! Gotta go! Let\u2019s go! Hurry! Shit\u2019s trying to kill us out there!\u201d<\/p>\n It could be too much for us to handle if we had to take an entire play without a moment to breathe.<\/p>\n The second purpose of acts was practical for the actors: It takes time to get changed. When that curtain falls the actors have a chance to get into new costumes, make minor adjustments and allow any set changes to occur. This is something that couldn\u2019t be done so long as the curtain was up and they were on stage, and with a more complicated story it\u2019s vital that you do it. After all, without such a change, all plays would exist in a single location taking place over real time. If you consider it, how many interesting things could happen in only a few hours of someone\u2019s life? Not a whole lot, right?<\/p>\n And that brings us to the third function of the intermission: progression of time. As the curtain falls, you\u2019re making a mental note that time will progress and that when the curtain rises again you will not be at the exact same moment of the story anymore. This allows you to skip through the timeline, to get the audience to recognize that two scenes aren\u2019t the exact same scene. This one trick, stopping the play, is absolutely vital for telling a story live in front of an audience.<\/p>\n So when you don’t have a live audience, some of this utility disappears. This is most particularly true in…<\/p>\n Outside of plays, intermissions fade away. So why do we keep teaching \u201cacts\u201d to new writers? The simple answer is that the first novelists were playwrights, the first screenwriters were playwrights, and the first teachers were (say it with me) playwrights. In fact, for film, the pull of the playwright mentality was so strong that earlier films, when they started to get longer and more complex, still had intermissions! For early film this made sense for several reasons:<\/p>\n This faded over time as film projection started to become a more seamless process and audiences got used to the new environment. No one had to worry about interrupting an actor on screen, so you didn\u2019t have to be as strict. And because it didn\u2019t have to be as strict, it became far easier to ignore that voice in the back of your head.<\/p>\n Television, meanwhile, can still use the act structure, but the intermissions there are more plentiful for a different reason: commercials. This is how a three act structure starts becoming five, six or even seven acts over time. As a television writer, the objective of your pacing above all else is to make sure that the story between the commercials is compelling enough to make sure that people come back after the commercial break. So that means you have to end every \u201cact\u201d with something that will make people want to come back after someone has tried to sell them something unrelated. This too, however, is beginning to fade away as streaming becomes more common.<\/p>\n Shows will soon have to be written more like short films and less like a television play. This could be a problem seeing as film still doesn\u2019t exactly have a structure of its own. That’s not to say that there aren’t some formulas which work, but film’s flow is a different beast (that I’ll tackle in a later entry). And, if you ever want to see how hard the jump can be, you can just consider how many things worked well on television that didn’t quite pan out in film.<\/p>\nStructure and Pacing<\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/div>\n<\/a><\/div>\nActs<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/div>\n<\/a><\/div>\n<\/a><\/div>\nFilm and Television<\/h2>\n
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