Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Twilight, even A Wrinkle In Time … technically, these books were never meant for those of us over the age of 18 or so. As Young Adult (or in the case of Harry Potter, Middle Grade) fiction, they were intended for the younger generation, and yet adults–by which I mean possibly you and definitely me–are still reading them by the bookmobileful. I think we’re supposed to be reading more serious stuff–maybe The Grapes of Wrath, or Moby Dick … War and Peace is probably good. I always tell people I’m reading War and Peace, and I’m at that part right near the end. This helps make sure they’ll change the subject quickly so that I don’t have to prove I don’t know what it’s about. Except, you know, obviously war, and also peace. Probably there’s something there about Russia invading … I don’t know, somebody. Maybe Russia invading Russia. Russia is pretty big: they could probably get away with that.

Anyway, my point is that it’s not always impressive and mature-sounding to say “Oh, I just read this great book written for 12-year-olds …” Here, as a public service, are some excuses writers and readers can use to cover for an addiction to young adult fiction.

• I have a teen at home, so I have to know what they’re reading to be a good parent.
• I work with teens, so I have to know what they’re reading to do my job.
• I know my kid is only four, but I have to be up to speed by the time she hits middle school.
• While I don’t have or work with kids now, I might someday, and it’s better to be safe than sorry.
• I mistook it for the latest long, boring novel about the grim reflections of an emotionally deprived settlement camp volunteer. That’s what I really meant to read.
• I’m a writer, and that market’s hot right now.
• I’m a writer, and I just want to make sure that I know what’s Young Adult so that I don’t write some by mistake.
• Actually, I’m pretty sure Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is classified as a technothriller.
• What, that? That’s not mine.
• Well you know, it’s interesting: it turns out that there are moral and ethical threads to the subtext that really delineate an entirely separate and more cerebral story not immediately evident if you don’t really dig in, but that with energetic literary analysis really emerges with a characteristic–wait, come back! Don’t you want to hear about the affective parallelism?
• Young adult fiction is where all the really steamy stuff is these days. Who wants to read about two old people doing it?
• Oh, I just have that because I’m translating it into Serbo-Croatian.
• That’s just one of the fake covers I use to hide my D.H. Lawrence books.
• That’s from when I was a kid. I only read eBooks now.
• Yes, I’m reading young adult fiction. When’s the last time you read a book you couldn’t put down?

We’ve been having some lively discussion about three-act structure on Codex, a conversation that was spurred by Film Crit Hulk’s post on three-act structure being useless, an allegation I pushed back against in my recent post “Three Act Structure: Essential Framework or Load of Hooey?” (Film Crit hulk posted a rebuttal comment on that post that was worth reading, too.)

Summarizing everything I gleaned from our discussion, I came up with this Q&A which answers all of your questions. (You’re welcome.)

Q: Are there different structures that different people refer to as “three-act structure?”
A: Yes

Q: Are any of these structures useless?
A: Yes

Q: Are any of these structures useful to all writers?
A: No.

Q: Are any of these structures useful to any writers?
A: Yes.

Q: Is the version Film Crit Hulk describes useful?
A: No.

Q: Is the version Luc describes useful?
A: For some people, sometimes.

Q: What, if anything, is three-act structure good for?
A: Story arc, character development, keeping the reader engaged, suspense, and emotional involvement.

Q: What is the standard proportion of act lengths in three-act structure?
A: It varies, but some common ones are 25%-50%-25% and 25%-58%-17%.

Q: Are those proportions necessary?
A: No.

Q: Does three-act structure in any form, or for that matter any structure, fit all stories?
A: No.

Q: How about all good stories?
A: Still no.

Q: Does three-act structure completely describe a plot?
A: No.

Q: Do acts in three-act structure correspond to acts in a play?
A: Not necessarily.

Q: Are there other structures that aren’t three-act structure?
A: Yes.

Q: Are they useful to any writers?
A: Some people seem to like some of them.

Q: Do some writers produce three-act structure without intending to?
A: Yes.

Q: Do all writers?
A: No.

Q: Can a story use a viable version of three-act structure and still suck?
A: Yes.

Photo by ~jjjohn~

Back in July, Film Crit Hulk posted this discourse on the utter uselessness of three-act structure. In case you’re not already familiar with three-act structure, it’s an approach often recommended as a key tool for writing, especially with screenplays.

The version of three-act structure Hulk takes apart in his post (“setup, rising action, resolution”) is indeed pretty useless–but it’s not useless because three-act structure is trash: it’s useless because it’s been oversimplified to the point of being hopelessly vague.

Three-act structure certainly isn’t something a successful writer needs to follow, but it can be a hugely useful tool if used properly.

Act I
In effective three-act structure (says me), the first act constitutes pitting the character against the conflict. Generally speaking, the incident that defines the transition from Act I to Act II is the protagonist committing to taking on the central problem; before that there’s resistance, avoidance, lack of understanding, etc. Simultaneously, you introduce the reader/viewer to the protagonist and the protagonist’s world. Referring to it as “setup” is trouble, because that sounds like you’re supposed to dump a bunch of background information or move characters uninterestingly into position.

Act II
Act II starts with the protagonist doing something to join the action, which usually means actively striving to make the situation better. Act II comprises repeated attempts by the protagonist to resolve the central story problem, usually resulting in disasters that up the stakes (hence “rising action,” though “rising action” makes it sound like it’s supposed to be some kind of an upward slope rather than a cycle that gets bigger each time through). I agree with Hulk that the movie Green Lantern sucks on this count, as Hal in the movie is reactive to circumstances instead of proactively trying to do something. It’s much more interesting to watch a character push to try to accomplish something–even (or perhaps especially) if that something is ill-considered–than it is to watch the character get hit with a bunch of plot developments and not do anything meaningful about them.

Act III
Act II ends with the introduction of the final gambit: this is where the protagonist commits to an all-or-nothing bid to make the thing happen. Thus Act III is the character trying to make that last plan work and probably having to adjust or reframe right in the middle of it (since if everything works as planned, it’s kinda boring).

Five acts?
Hulk points out that Shakespeare wrote in five acts, but Shakespeare’s stories can also be considered in the light of real three act structure. The turning point between the first and second acts is where Romeo leaps the orchard fence prior to the balcony scene (Act II, scene 1), after which the two lovers commit to each other despite their families’ enmities. They struggle to be together, marry, have their moment of love, and Romeo has his run-in with Tybalt throughout the second act.

Act III is the desperate gambit, Juliet’s plan to fake her death and how that pans out (Act IV, scene 1). Note that Shakespeare puts act breaks in both these places.

Formulaic?
If you’re concerned that three-act structure is formulaic, I’d suggest that you can ease your mind. Three-act structure is a set of ideas about tension and satisfaction that suggest a way to structure a story. You can’t simply plug in details to get a good story: good writing always takes craft and artistry, regardless of whether it’s on a framework.

Not every good story fits three-act structure. However, it’s a very widespread and successful approach to story writing if properly understood. It has certainly been useful to me!

By the way, I later followed up this post with an additional one: Three-Act Structure: Answers to All Your Questions.

Continuing my series of quotes from writers I know through the online writing group Codex, here are some memorable thoughts from James Maxey, author of the Dragon Age trilogy and the superhero novel Nobody Gets the Girl. James’s latest feat, which floored a number of us at Codex, was writing the first draft of a novel (the sequel to Nobody) in a week. The resulting book, Burn Baby Burn, can be read in its first draft form as a series of blog posts on Maxey’s Web site. More on this particular accomplishment will show up in a week or two in my “Brain Hacks for Writers” column on Futurismic.

James is quoted often on Codex, so I’ll be breaking up the large selection of his quotes I put together into two or possibly three posts.

Swagger when you lie.

If the WRATH OF GOD couldn’t make this character give a sh**, I don’t know what might.

The worst novel you ever put onto paper is better than the best novel you are walking around with in your head.

On the other hand, I may be underestimating the appeal of my main character, a homosexual, drug-addicted, Republican, vivisectionist zombie. Sweet merciful Jesus, I wish that last sentence was a joke…

Momentum matters!

I can’t sing, play an instrument, dance, paint, sculpt, or act. So, in my early years, I drifted toward writing as my claim to some sort of creative ability simply because it seemed like the easiest talent to fake.

But a completed novel is always going to be haunted by the novel it might have been.

If you have affection and enthusiasm for your characters, then the readers will follow you into some very dark places.

If you and your partner find yourself co-owners of a project that gets optioned for a motion picture and I hear you complain about it on this forum, I will personally drive to your house and slap you about the head and shoulders with a rubber monkey until my envy is abated. And I can be very, very envious.

If anyone wants to power a time machine, the deadline for the first novel you ever sell from a proposal has amazing time acceleration properties. I can only imagine that committing to a whole series must propel you straight into old age.

My motto is, little by little, the writing gets done.

Is Batman really making the world a better place by wearing his underwear on the outside of his pants and clobbering muggers with boomerangs? I think that having your characters learn the wrong lessons from their private tragedies is the key to making them interesting.

… the key to writing a good novel is to first write a bad novel. You’re just piling clay onto the wheel at this stage. You aren’t spinning the wheel to turn it into something until the second draft.

But, I don’t yell. I write. I turn our presidents and judges and televangelists into dragons and I send heroes (or, more frequently, anti-heroes) out to slay them.

Look, I’ve had it up to here with people dismissing all Yellow-Eyed Beasts from Hell as “evil.” The idea that Judea-Christian labels for morality apply to creatures from the pit is an outdated, human-centric view of the world that I hope we, as a society, are finally outgrowing. Baby-eating and stabbing people with pitchforks may seem taboo to most Americans, but what right to we have to impose our values on the denizens of the underworld?

For me–and I can’t speak for anyone else–my formula was stupid stubbornness. I kept plugging along despite rejection letters and harsh critiques because I was too dumb to understand that I really was no good at what I was doing and it was time to give up and move on to something else.

The one thing you can do is buy a lot of lottery tickets, metaphorically. Every short story you write might be the one that wins you an award. You never know. Any book you write might be the exact book that a publisher is dreaming of publishing. Productivity is key.

If Jesus himself were to tell me the sky is blue, I’d argue the point. I mean, sure, sometimes the sky is blue, but a high percentage of the time it’s black, or gray, or white, or any of the zillion shades of pink or purple you find in the bookends of day.

My young adult novel Family Skulls is now available for the Kindle, temporarily priced at 99 cents. Here’s the brief description. If you’d like a free review copy (electronic only), drop me a line!

No one will help 16-year-old Seth Quitman–ever, with anything. Seth’s family live in a small Vermont town under a curse that has hounded them for generations, one that makes anything they may need–from a bus ride to a recommendation letter to an ambulance–forever out of their reach.

Until now, Seth’s family has done the best they could under the curse, knowing that the hill sorcerer family that cursed them could do much, much worse. But now things have gone farther than Seth can stand, and he plans to face down the curse-keeper and free his family–or die trying.

I have a hard time figuring out how the world will end. War? Plague? Alien invasion? Robot insurrection? The gods getting bored? A gentle fade? Cosmic disaster? The possibilities are not only varied, they’re also interesting. If it’s the last day ever, do you reveal your secret crush? What do you do in the last 5 seconds of your life? What if your band’s first good gig ever has been interrupted by the robot insurrection and a little girl wanders into the bar after everyone’s run away in panic–do you give her pineapple juice? These and other questions kept charging my subconscious with stories I needed to write about the end of the world, and 16 such made their way into my book Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories for Kindle and other eReaders.

My new, free, eBook, 17 Stories About the End of the World, offers those 16 plus a new one (“The End”). Well, I say free: you can get it for free on Smashwords or for 99 cents on Amazon (authors aren’t given a way to offer a book for free on Amazon, but if you put it up for a price on Amazon and for free on another eBook site, Amazon will sometimes drop the price to free, though it’s hard to say why that should be the only way to do it).

A little while back I reported that I was attempting to use the Snowflake Method (or parts of it, anyway) as I develop my new novel. My progress has been slow, to say the least: unfortunately, the novel can’t take priority over a variety of other things I’m doing in my life at this point, so I’ve had to be satisfied to this point with gradually building the story as time allows. I’ve been researching Russian and Soviet history (important in understanding some of the characters and events in my story) and planning out my novel step by small step in the Snowflake fashion.

Snowflake forces me to delve deeper before moving ahead. For instance, in the first step, it required me to know and state in a sentence what my novel was about. Then I had to settle on the major turns in the story and come up with an ending, neither of which I was particularly inclined to do at that point if I had been left to my own devices, but both of which have given me a much deeper understanding of where the story was going. In the current step, which requires a period of focus on each major character in turn, it’s forcing me to understand all of my characters well enough to see where they are headed in the course of the novel. What are they each after? How do they change? What are their biggest obstacles? (If you want to read the specific questions instead of my generalizations, you can read about the Snowflake Method on Randy Ingermanson’s Web site.)

I haven’t generally been a fan of cataloging everything there is to know about a character. Yes, it’s nice to know what the character had for breakfast that morning, but that doesn’t really give me much to go on when I’m trying to envision what a character will do or say next. The questions I’m forced to answer for my Snowflake outlining are much more telling and basic: I find out that Nancy, a mother and wife in my story, is trying to get her husband to move their family out of a war zone and getting nowhere with it, which helps me know Nancy much better than if I just knew that she had dry rye toast for breakfast and wanted to marry the postman when she was three. Since goals very often have to do with other people, like in this case, it also tells me some useful things about Nancy’s husband and son and their relationships. Building a web of strong relationships that have built-in conflicts like this yields a story that has a chance of breaking out and writing itself. That’s one reason I’ve gotten so much enjoyment out of Joss Whedon’s star-crossed TV series Firefly: the central characters were a tightly-knit group, but they also had built-in conflicts with one another.

To come at it from another angle: I sometimes get the chance to talk with my father, an actor, about what acting and writing fiction might have in common. I gather from these conversations that one of the things he and many other actors do is to find a specific goal in every scene, a process that can furnish drive, focus, and direction. If you’ve ever seen grade school actors just stand there and fidget, unsure what to do until their next line comes along, you’ll see why I value this kind of point of view, and why a goal-focused view of characters, as Dr. Ingermanson’s approach requires me to take, is promising me something beyond just a better familiarity with my cast.

Photo by viking_79

Kelly Barnhill is a teacher, mom, and writer from Minneapolis. Her stories have sold to magazines like Postscripts, Clarkesworld, and Weird Tales, and she has written thirteen nonfiction books for kids. This Codex Blog Tour interview delves into where she finds time, focus, and inspiration to write, and how her writing complements the other parts of her life.

So you have a new novel for middle grade readers called The Mostly True Story of Jack coming out from Little, Brown in August, but you have a lot of prior experience writing science books for kids (e.g., Sewers and the Rats That Love Them). Does the nonfiction writing help you in writing fiction for kids of the same age group?

Oh, absolutely. My work writing nonfiction for children was something I actually never set out to do. I had written to Capstone Press a year earlier, hoping to do some curriculum work. They came back asking me to write them a couple of books – and very specific books indeed. These books needed to appeal to both boys and girls, they needed to be informative, factual, and funny. They needed a strong voice, smooth readability, short sentences, chunked information, and high interest. I had insanely strict word counts – not only in total, but I had limits as to how long my average sentence length could be, how long my paragraphs could be, how many words could be on each page. It was like nonfiction haiku. But funny. Hardest thing I ever did.

The thing is, that work – that painstaking, back-breaking, soul-crushing work – was probably the best thing I ever did. I became ruthlessly economical. I became much more concerned with voice. I learned to see the humor in everything (now, granted, when you’re writing a book on the history of the sewer system, the humor just, um, flows, but when you’re writing a book on famous hoaxes, or weird rituals, or horrifying medical practices, you’ve got to be pretty flexible and open to humor). My work as a nonfiction writer built me into the writer I am now. And really, it convinced me that I really could write for children. And then I started my novel.

What do you hope kids get out of reading your fiction? Is the most important thing that the story be fun, or are there lessons to be learned, or is the goal something less concrete than that?
I guess I never really thought of it that way. I think, in a lot of ways, people who write for children are secretly writing letters to the person we were as children. I write about loneliness because as a child I was lonely. I write about characters who struggle with anger and disillusionment and the mercilessness of hope because as a child I was angry, and disillusioned – and I knew that hope, while redeeming and sustaining, was also merciless. Hope makes requirements on a person. I write fiction because I want to tell the child that was – the lonely child, the struggling child, the hurting child – that friendship is possible, and love is possible, and hope doesn’t always hurt.

I write fiction to give gifts to the child I was: strong legs, clear eyes, quick hands and wings – wings made of ink, wings made of paper, wings made of pencil shavings and eraser bits. And I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty sure she received them. I’m pretty sure she stepped out, scanned the skies, ran, leaped, and flew.

What has been the biggest obstacle to your writing so far? Have you had to take any special steps to deal with it?

The biggest issue for me right now is time. I teach; I parent; I write. Unfortunately, those three occupations spring from the same place in my heart – which is a bit of a strain. For a lot of years, the entirety of my writing time happened between the hours of four and and six in the morning. At six, the children woke, and my day followed the rhythm of my children. Lately, things have gotten easier – all three kids are in school, and I have the great luxury of working during the daytime. Even still, it is now the rhythm of the story that I have to contend with – and that is a rhythm that is not my own. Because I don’t outline – and I approach story writing in the same way that I approach story reading, that same sense of wonder, expectation and excitement – I often wander down trails that I later have to abandon. Characters emerge, flourish, and disappear. Stories are written, then re-written from memory. It’s a messy process and an unpredictable process, but it’s mine, and I’ll keep it.

In recent posts like “A Novel in One Sentence” I’ve mentioned that I’m trying out the Snowflake method for writing my current novel. This is a much more deliberate and structured way to go about it than I’ve ever used before (although I have outlined large writing projects in the past), and in a way is an experiment in doing something in a structured way when I could have chosen just to dive in instead.

Is all this structure helping? So far, absolutely yes. In step 1 I got a clear picture of what my novel is really about, which is extremely useful. Step 2 forced me to figure out the major turns in the story and my ending. The ending especially was difficult to see, but now that I’ve gotten an idea of what it will be I find I have more confidence in the book, and I have an important bit of planning done in a way that will allow it to do a lot of good.

I’m currently on Step 3, and it’s taking me forever. Why? Because I have to have all of my characters fleshed out in some major respects here in Step 3. I’m used to my characters either appearing full-fledged in my mind or to getting to know them through writing them. They often surprise me and step in to become much more interesting than anything I could have planned out. (I’m not a fan of the “come up with all kinds of detailed information about your character” approach because I feel like this focuses things on trivia and not on the character’s personality and driving needs, but your mileage may vary.)

I have to admit, though, stopping and figuring out some basic questions about each character (as distinct from trivial details) forces me to have a whole set of characters with goals, needs, and perspectives from the beginning. Also, I have little details that would be annoying and distracting to come up with as I write taken care of: for instance, I’m spending the time up front figuring out names for each character, which are something that have to feel exactly right for me to write them well.

Despite all of these benefits, I still am itching to just start writing the book. It’s writing fiction, after all, not planning it, that is the delight and the meat of the task for me. I’m frankly not sure I’ll last through the rest of the snowflake steps, especially considering that step 7, for instance, is about cataloging all of those character details I don’t much care for. At what point does a useful structure become too confining and get in the way of going organically forward?

From the point of view of the quality of the book, I’m not sure how long I should ideally stick with the structure, though I am sure that at a certain point I want to be able to plunge into the story and live there: I don’t want to construct every shoe and blade of grass and drop of blood first and then fit everything together like a jigsaw. At some point I’ll want to have some forward motion.

Yet when that point comes, I suspect I’ll be very glad that I stuck to structuring as long as I did. I guess we’ll see.

Photo by Juliancolton2

I’m reading three books in alternation at the moment, and I’m not sure I trust any of them.

Trusting a writer’s competence
The first is a non-fiction book about how people change, and while it’s interesting and entertaining so far, one of their opening topics is some of the research that has been done into the alleged depletion of willpower–experiments where half the subjects are given a task that requires willpower and half aren’t, and then all subjects are given a task that (unknown to them) is impossible. The finding is that the people who have not had to exercise willpower in the first part of the experiment tend to stick with the impossible task longer. The researchers concluded from this that willpower must be a resource that can be used up.

Without going into the subject in great detail here, the conclusion is just a theory of how willpower works, and it isn’t one for which anyone as far as I know of has offered a realistic mechanism. The experimental results (the group that hasn’t had to exert willpower doing better on the task) are interesting, but the interpretation is just an educated guess, and a problematic one–see “Does Willpower Really Get Used Up?.” Yet the authors of the book I’m reading talk about the theory as though it’s established fact and move on from there. Do they really not understand the difference between scientific evidence and a theory used to explain the evidence? This is key for someone who’s going to be interpreting the results of scientific studies.

So for that first book, I’m not sure I trust the authors’ competence, which is a problem.

Trusting a writer’s intentions
The second book is a novel, John Kennedy O’Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. I have a vague idea that I’ve read it before, but all I remembered was how revolting the main character was. Re-reading it, I find that all of the characters are revolting: they’re stupid or weak or pitiable or mindlessly self-centered. I don’t believe that’s what people are actually like, as a rule, and so when an author fills a novel with such characters at the start, then I have to wonder what the author’s view of the world is and where the story is going. In this book, I don’t trust the author’s intentions for the book.

Trusting a writer’s personality
The third book is actually a series of lectures on CD, but since it’s very much like an audiobook, I’m treating it as one. The subject is Russian history, and the lecturer has a great many strong credentials. What I’ve heard so far of the series is interesting, clear, and–as far as I can tell–very well-informed. I feel pretty confident that the guy knows what he’s talking about.  So what’s my problem? I don’t have much of one, except that the author’s photo is on the front of the CD case, and in that photo his smile is one-sided, a type of expression that often means pretend friendliness that actually masks contempt or displeasure. The expression reminds me of an acquaintance whose actions and choices are routinely awful and unkind. So in this case, I don’t trust the author personally–admittedly, based on very scant information. It’s very iffy to try to interpret body language based on a single expression or gesture (see “How to Tell If Someone’s Interested in You, and Other Powers of Body Language“)–but I’m on my guard.

Trust in person
When someone asks “Do you trust me?”, they’re really asking at least three different things:

1) Do you trust my intentions?
2) Do you trust my decisions?
3) Do you trust my skills?

For instance, someone might offer to take care of my kids for me, and if I didn’t trust them on any of those three fronts, then I’d have to say no. If I didn’t trust that they intended to keep my kids safe, happy, and healthy, then that would be a no go. If they did mean well but tended to make bad choices–for instance, if the person were an active alcoholic or very absent-minded–then there would still be a problem, because I wouldn’t trust their ability to make good decisions. And people who mean well and are on the ball but don’t know what they hell they’re doing aren’t good candidates for an important job, either.

This applies to books because writing a book is an important job. If the book is successful at all, it will have anything from hundreds to millions of readers, and each reader is going to devote hours of focused attention to the book, which gives the writer responsibility for thousands to many millions of hours of readers’ time. Personally, if I’m going to invest, say, 6 or 7 hours in reading a book (which is roughly how long it takes an average adult reader to read an average novel), I want to be sure I’m investing that time well.

How it all shakes out
So for the non-fiction book, I’ll read a little further and see whether the authors seem to be taking care with their facts. If not, I’ll stop reading, because bad information is worse than no information at all.

For the novel, I may or may not read a little further to see if there’s any hint of a worldview that I care about. If the author continues to go on depicting a world in which everyone is pathetic and awful, I’ll drop it, because I don’t think that’s a realistic or useful way to look at the world. I wonder if that isn’t what I did the first time I tried reading it.

But where the Russian history lectures are concerned, I think I’ll probably keep listening. Even if the author happens to be an unkind or untrustworthy individual personally (and of course I have no clear reason to believe that he is, just a hint that he might be), I do trust him to do a good job of teaching about Russia through audio lectures, because that’s not an activity that requires any personal interaction. This is one place where writing departs from taking care of children, that in some cases bad people can write good books.

What about you? Do you trust the books you’re reading? Or writing?

Photo by K’s GLIMPSES