What is the second act? When does it begin? When does it end? I started asking myself these questions after watching this writers roundtable the other day (thank you, commenter who posted this). John Favreau brings up a great point about how the second act is a series of lessons for your main character, and that’s something I’ll get to later on. But just the topic of the second act in general intrigued me, because I think no matter how much you dissect it, the second act is still full of mysteries. It’s like this cave where, every time you think you’ve found the end, there’s another little tunnel that extends even deeper.
Before you can figure anything out about this elusive act, though, you have to know where it begins and where it ends. It begins when your character goes on his journey to pursue his goal. So for those of you who saw Interstellar, that would’ve been when Coop blasts off in his ship on his JOURNEY to find new planets that will save mankind.
The end of the second act is a little trickier to locate. A lot of people will say that it’s when your character is at his lowest point. But I don’t think that’s helpful. It doesn’t give you a concrete destination to take your character. A better definition is probably: when it APPEARS that your main character has FAILED at his goal. Now Interstellar had a whole lot of shit going on, so it’s not the easiest script to decipher when this happened, but I’d probably say the end of the second act is (spoiler) when Matt Damon nearly kills Coop. Either that or when Matt Damon destroys the orbiting ship. In The Hangover, it’d be when they think they’ve found Doug, only to realize it’s not “their” Doug. Time is up. There’s nowhere else to look. They’ve failed at their goal.
Preferably, this “start goal/finish goal” is how you’d approach all your second acts. But as we all know, not every story is this “clean.” Sometimes, the character goal will shift to something else in the middle of the movie (in Aliens, the goal is to go in there and kill the aliens. But when that goes bad, it becomes more about escaping). In other cases, the goal isn’t concrete (American Beauty). And in some movies, there isn’t a goal driving the story at all (When Harry Met Sally). Now I’m not saying that every screenplay has to be goal-oriented, but I will say that the further you move away from that model, the trickier the second act gets. And when you’re talking about something that’s tricky ANYWAY, you can see why so many scripts die here.
To be honest, I wish someone would write a book and just definitively declare the death of the 3-Act structure and make it 4 acts instead. That way you’d have 4 evenly divided sections, making it so much easier to get a handle on your story. In the 4-act scenario, the second act would be the “wind-up” act, where mysteries are being set up and the hero is getting a feel for just how bad the situation is. And the 3rd act would be when the shit really hits the fan. When the big-daddy obstacles are thrown at your hero and when success really starts to come into doubt. The 4th act would then be the rebirth, regroup and charge-in act. To me that’s a lot easier to get my head around.
But even if you have all that stuff in order, there are still certain things you gotta hit in the second act. Obstacles, for example. You want to throw things in the way of your hero so that nothing they do is easy. And remember, it’s hard to throw obstacles at your hero if they don’t have a goal they’re pursuing. Because if there’s no goal, then how do you place something in the way of that goal?
Now here’s where we get to what Favreau was talking about. As much focus is put on properly plotting the second act, the second act is really about character, and more specifically, TESTING YOUR HERO. Let me repeat that. The second act should put your hero through a SERIES OF TESTS. If you’re not testing your hero, you’re not developing your character. And the development of your character is the key to creating an emotional connection with the audience.
To achieve this, you first have to know what your main character’s flaw is. What is it that’s keeping them from being happy, keeping them from being “whole?” This is something your hero may not even be aware of. So for Gravity, Sandra Bullock’s character’s flaw was that she’d given up on life. She’d packed it in. This way, every obstacle that arrived onscreen wasn’t just an excuse to create a fun special effects shot. It was a test of her resolve. To see if she would fight to live or to give in. So the one-two punch of finding a flaw, and then repeatedly testing that flaw, is one that really packs an emotional wallop into the second act, and what builds the bridge for you to care so much in that final act, when the final test arrives.
In addition to this, the second act is about keeping things fresh. Most of the bad second acts I read – and I read a lot – make one critical mistake. They keep giving you the same thing. For example, I recently read a romantic comedy where the main character was pursuing a girl. The second act consisted of scene after scene of him trying to win over this girl. They were all the same scenes. Sure, the locations were different, but the make-up of each of these scenes was the same.
You solve this by BUILDING your second act. And to properly build, you need to do two things. Each major plot point must feel bigger than the previous one. And each major plot point must have HIGHER STAKES than the previous one. There will be some ebb and flow in the valleys between the major plot points. But the plot points themselves must feel bigger as they go on. Early in the second act of Star Wars, Luke and Obi-Wan need to find a pilot. The stakes are pretty high cause of this R2-D2 fellow. Later in the second act, they’re trying to escape from the Death Star with the Princess. A bigger plot point with higher stakes.
But just building isn’t enough. The second act is such a huge chasm of never-ending space that you have to surprise your audience every once in awhile, or else they get bored. You can do this with a surprising mid-point twist (in Gone Girl – spoiler – this is when we find out that Amy has been conning Nick), you can have your hero unexpectedly achieve his goal (he finds the killer!) only to announce a new goal soon after (it turns out they were after the wrong guy all along – the real killer’s still out there!). Or just throw in a fun surprise or three, something the audience isn’t expecting.
Keep in mind that it’s really hard to do any of this without a plan in place. And this is where you usually see the difference between amateurs and pros. Amateurs will try and wing the second act. They’ll try to come up with all these things on the fly, not realizing just how long the act is, usually resulting in them running out of steam (almost always around page 50).
Pros know that the second act is like a 100 day hike up the Pacific Coast Trail. If they don’t chart how much food and water they need, when they’re going to reach re-supply stations, or forget crucial tools they need to survive, they’re probably going to die. So as much as some of you hate to hear this, one of the biggest keys to surviving the second act is outlining. It’s a portion of the script that’s screaming out for a plan. And while I’m not saying you non-outliners can’t be one of the lucky ones who emerges at the finish line unscathed, it’s a lot more likely that you’ll die a drawn out agonizing death. ☺
I’d love to hear your own experiences with second acts and what helps you guys get through them. The more we can help each other out, the better we all get.
