Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29500
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I feel like there's a lot of talking around the central point rather than addressing it:

**The word "act" is sometimes used as part of a metaphor.**

This metaphor imagines a story to be somewhat like a play, with certain logical breaks in the story dividing it up into "scenes" and several of those scenes being lumped together into larger story segments called "acts." In a play, these logical breaks are moments for the stage hands to work at setting the physical configuration of the set; in a more general story they may not be clear or nice at all, since metaphors do not usually perfectly describe reality.

Many story-writing or story-analysis guidelines try to break a story into acts. Possibly the simplest one is the three-act analysis, which goes something like this:

> A story has a _beginning_, a _middle_, and an _end_. The _beginning_ sets up the bigger question of the story as well as little questions of the story: including the people who are asking the question and the setting that the question is being asked. The _middle_ is a series of anecdotes which answer some questions and raise further questions along the way. Finally the _end_ sees the bigger question answered, allowing some form of closure for the audience so that the story does not have to continue forever.

As you can see, this is very generic. It is also not the only way to analyze a story. For example Dan Harmon has an [8-point storytelling structure](http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit) which I would call "the descent into Hell" and describe in four acts:

> In Act I, "Introduction", we are introduced to characters who are living in some "normal" setting, but we are also introduced to something wrong or unsatisfactory with that setting, which prompts the characters to begin a journey into some new "abnormal" setting which we might call Hell. In Act II, "Descent", these characters descend into Hell, usually failing due to their unfamiliarity, until they adapt to Hell and can finally make their own way. In Act III, "Trial by Fire", they learn whatever they wanted to learn or get whatever they wanted to get, but in order to do so, Hell burns them somehow. Finally in Act IV, "Ascent", they return from Hell back to the normal world, having whatever they needed, but also having profoundly changed.

This has strong ties to Joseph Campbell's "monomyth" ideas as well. We see that the three-act analysis above probably would lump "End" into the second half of "Trial by Fire" and the entirety of "Ascent", or so. The breaks are fuzzy because metaphors do not perfectly describe reality.

In addition while the second template describes way more stories than it should (see e.g. the 2015 Tina Fey/Amy Poehler comedy, _Sisters_, as well as 1979's classic _Alien_ to get an idea of how widely this thing works), it cannot describe all of the stories that the first one can describe. For instance there is a story structure which is the _diametric opposite_ of the descent into hell; one might call it the ascent into Heaven, favored in Chinese/Korean/Japanese culture and called [kishōtenketsu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5%8Dtenketsu) in the latter. There's still an introduction act, but there is nothing unsatisfactory about the starting setting: rather the characters there introduced pursue some Heaven for obvious reasons and in the second act Ascend into that Heaven. But in a third act there is some "Twist" act, some strange thing that should not be happening or some observation or question that reveals that not all is perfect in Heaven: and then as this twist unravels the abstraction, the characters are kicked out of heaven and descend back down to their original setting. Still a beginning, middle, and end: but exactly the opposite story arc.

It is very likely that your show was using some related metaphor for how their comedy show was broken up into "acts." It is not a uniquely defined metaphor; it is a fuzzy application of play logic to other stories.

Original score: 5