Three-Act Structure & Writer's Block

In my last post, I went into the weeds a bit on what the three-act plot structure was. If you’re someone who likes plotting out your writing, even just a few of the important beats, it’s a structure you are familiar with. And even if you aren’t, you recognize the structure from most movies and even some TV shows, let alone books. 

So what if you‘re having the age-old problem of writer’s block?

I’m going to ask you to try an experiment.

Instead of re-reading what you’ve written so far, or plotting out your story if you don’t normally plot, or going back to your beat sheet if you have one, let’s engage a different part of your brain instead.

Step One:

Cast your characters.

On some level, we all do this. We match the descriptions in the book we’re reading to an actor, or we ignore the descriptions and imagine our favorite actress in the role. If you’re writing a character maybe they remind you (accidentally or not) of Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail or Samuel L. Jackson in your favorite of his movies. It’s always fun, and sometimes it is helpful to us as writers.

Step Two:

Get your favorite hot beverage, maybe a snack, and get comfortable.

Now, play your story out in your head like it is a movie. Is the movie what you expected or have the characters taken over? Does the movie skip the parts you’re having trouble with when writing or do you find that this way you see things clearly?

Step Three:

Maybe “watch” your movie more than once so you can note if you’re missing anything you think is important. Do you see the traditional three-act structure in your movie? Is that helping to move your plot along? Are you finding parts boring? Are the characters not facing enough danger or are the stakes not high enough? What would make you more interested in watching this?

Step Four:

After you’ve “watched” your story a few times take notes. When we visualize things, we use a different part of our brain and notice things differently than when we’re reading. So you might solve your writer’s block this way by discovering what stakes you need to raise to invest your characters in their situation, or how to get them out of the corner you wrote them into. “Seeing” and “hearing” them might have given you the key to their emotional difficulties in a way that reading them on the page didn’t. 

This won’t work for everyone, and some of us are doing a version of this as we write anyway. But writer’s block can be tricky and sometimes you have to get around it in odd ways to let yourself see your story in a fresh way. If nothing else, you’ve given yourself permission to not turn on the computer for an afternoon but are still doing work, which might keep your nagging stress voice to a low level. 

It’s worth a try. Let me know if you had any success with this method!