The Final Essential First Act Ingredient: GSU!
Day 1: Writing a Teaser
Day 2: Introducing Your Hero
Day 3: Setting up Your Hero’s Life
Day 8: Keeping Your Scenes Entertaining
Day 9: The Inciting Incident
Day 10: Refusal of the Call
Day 15: Dealing with Exposition
Okay, let’s summarize everything we’ve learned so far about the first act.
We’ve either written or not written an opening teaser scene depending on our genre. We’ve introduced our protagonist in a strong memorable way. We’ve set up that protagonist’s life, including their friends, their family, and their job. We’ve set up an antagonist. We’ve constructed our scenes so that they’re entertaining and not only there to convey information. We’ve introduced an inciting incident that has rocked our hero’s world, creating a problem. Our hero is then forced to make a choice: Do they or do they not go off on a journey and try and solve this problem? The hero will, in most cases, refuse this call to adventure. Just like us, heroes hate change. They would rather stay in their comfortable little bubble than do anything dangerous. However, in the end, whether a secondary plot beat forces them to or because they decide on their own, they accept the call to adventure and off they go, into the second act.
That’s it, right?
We’re in the second act now. We’re done. Finito el first acto.
Not quite.
Because there’s one last thing you need in place before you leave your first act.
GSU!
Long-time readers of the site know what GSU is but for those don’t, here’s a quick recap. “G” stands for “Goal.” It is the character goal that will drive the majority of the story. In The Batman, the goal is to find and stop a serial killer (The Riddler). In Jungle Cruise, the goal is to find the treasure in the jungle. In Old, the goal is for the beachgoers to get off the beach before they all die of old age. In Marry Me, the goal is… actually I have no idea what the goal is cause I still don’t understand that movie or why anybody made it.
In some scenarios, the goal will be driven by characters other than the hero, such as the villain. In Empire Strikes Back, the primary goal is Darth Vader’s. He’s trying to find Luke Skywalker. I bring this up because writers get confused as to what to do when their hero doesn’t have a goal. In those cases, somebody else in the story has to have the goal. If no key character has a strong goal going into the second act, boy are you making things hard for yourself.
“S” stands for “Stakes” and you’ll note that you can’t have stakes without a goal. The goal causes the stakes. For example, let’s say your character needs to find 50,000 dollars or else the bookies he owes money to will kill him, like Uncut Gems. The goal (getting the money) is what dictates the stakes (or else they kill him). You want the stakes to be as high as you can make them relative to your story.
What I mean by that is, if you’re writing a romantic comedy, it doesn’t make sense for the stakes to be life or death. Life or death stakes are for different types of movies. But if we establish that the girl our hero wants is someone he’s been in love with for 20 years, and this is the only chance he’s going to get to be around her, then those stakes are high relative to the movie. You’ve got one chance at the girl you’ve been in love with your whole life.
“U” stands for “Urgency.” I cannot stress enough how valuable urgency is to a story. I’ve told countless writers in consultations to tighten up their timeline with some sort of urgent deadline and their script ALWAYS gets better. Take the example I just used above about a guy trying to win over the girl he’s been in love with for 20 years. Let’s say that this girl is only in town for one weekend. That makes his job infinitely harder than if he has an entire year to win her over.
That’s what urgency does. It doesn’t just make your hero have to complete his goal. It makes him have to complete his goal RIGHT NOW. Next month will be too late. Next week will be too late. Maybe even the next day will be too late. You still have to come up with a ticking clock that’s organic to your story. For example, Mark Watley in The Martian was stuck on Mars for an entire year. But that’s because it takes time for spaceships to get to Mars. But you should make the urgency as tight as the story will allow you to.
The reason you want your GSU set in the first act is because it’s what powers your second act. The weaker your GSU is, the more you’ll struggle in that second act. When writers come to me and say, “I ran out of juice in the second act. I couldn’t think of any more scenes,” it’s almost always because their hero’s goal wasn’t clear enough or strong enough. A hero with a strong goal will always have something to do. Because they will always be taking steps to get to their goal.
Batman has a very strong goal. There’s a dude out there killing people. You’ll never run out of scenes to write with a setup that powerful because the goal is so clear: Find this guy and stop him. By the way, this is why so many movies and TV shows have murderers. Because murders set up such a clear and concise goal: Someone has to find them.
Now there are movies where the GSU is weaker. I’m not saying those movies should never be written. But I will tell you right now, they are way harder to write due to the fact that a lack of GSU equates to a lack of narrative momentum. If characters aren’t desperately pursuing their goal, it means they are either stagnant or reactionary.
Even The Dude (The Big Lebowski), the laziest main character in film history, is active because he has a goal – to retrieve money for the rug two thugs ruined.
If you *are* writing more of a character piece set in the real world and feel that a giant goal would swallow your story up, still try to find SOME GOAL that keeps your character active. Or I promise you, you’ll have nothing to write within 15 pages of the second act. For example, the Apple film, Coda, is about a deaf family who make their living fishing. You could’ve easily written an aimless second act that followed the family fishing, and fishing, and then fishing some more. But instead, they added this goal where the main character, Ruby, was trying to make it into a prestigious art school through singing. That pursuit is what structured the second act narrative.
I can’t stress this enough. A weak second act is almost always the result of a first act that doesn’t set up strong GSU. It should be noted that goals *can change* during a movie. The goal that sets your character off on their journey is not always the goal they must accomplish in the third act. That’s because some movies will start with small goals and then keep throwing things at the hero in the second act that require them to pursue bigger and bigger goals. For example, The Dude starts off trying to get reimbursed for the damage to his rug. But he ends up having to retrieve a giant bag of money after his situation escalated later on. Or, in Star Wars, Luke starts off trying to deliver a droid. But he ends up with a much bigger goal: Destroy the Death Star.
But you should still have as big of a goal coming out of the first act as you can muster.
This concludes the main part of writing your first act. You should’ve written 24 pages by today. You will have written 30 pages by the end of the weekend, which means you’ll be finished. Again, I like first acts to be 25 pages. But since this is a first draft, we want to go a little long, as we’ll get back in there and edit it down next week.
Next First Act Post: Monday, March 21
Pages to write until next post: 6
Pages you should have completed by Thursday: 30 (all of them)
