Had a talk with my English teacher about why she hates the three-act structure

She said it forces every story into a mold that kills the organic flow of real human experience, and after thinking about her argument for three days I'm starting to wonder if my writing has been too safe.

2 comments

2 Comments

williams.jenny2d ago

My tenth grade English teacher made us map out "The Most Dangerous Game" on a three act graph and I remember thinking... wait, doesn't that story have like five distinct chase scenes that break any neat little box you'd try to put it in. She'd probably call it lazy shortcuts or something but I've been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace essays lately and you can tell he's shoving three act structure out a window on purpose, letting thoughts trail into footnotes that go on for pages and pages. Maybe the real problem isn't the structure itself but how teachers make it sound like a recipe instead of a starting point you can drift away from whenever you feel like it.

webb.ben1d ago

Wait, is that where teachers get stuck on the wrong thing? I had a buddy in college who wrote a whole short story that was basically one long chase scene with no real breaks, and his professor loved it because he said it broke the rules on purpose. But then the same professor flunked another kid for not having a clear climax, so I guess some rules are just more flexible than others depending on who's grading.