Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Go Into The Story: "Why is it three act structure? The cycle of life."

This is the dumbest thing I've read on the subject of writing in quite a while. Not only is it stupid, but there's no substance to it. There's nothing intrinsically useful about thinking about things in three's. There's certainly nothing in the graphs that give a clue about how they break into three's. There's no such thing as the "cycle of life." And even Aristotle is pretty vague about how you divide something into a beginning, a middle, and a end.

Why not just have a beginning and an end, a cause and an effect. You could work entirely in binaries and have something just as unhelpful.

The idea that you need something in three parts is just a myth. Worse yet, the idea that you need to justify your outline is just a distraction from actual creative work.