A dissatisfaction with the current progress of Lovecraft Country has me thinking about second act issues. Of course, when I speak of second acts, I am referring to the traditional three act structure that many films and television shows employ even though I myself utilize a five-act structure when building out a novel.

In the three act model the first act is establishment of the characters, the world, and the central conflict of the story. The third act is after all the major revelations and the characters hurtle towards their final conflicts and resolution leaving the second act, which is the same size in term of word or page counts as the other two combines, as a vast middle where advancement and reversal take place as the characters chart the course of the plot. It is not unusual for second acts to become muddled and messy as their purpose doesn’t seem as well defined as acts one or three. This is in part why I like the five-act system instead of one massive poorly defined act there are two with better laid out purposes.

What’s important is that the characters have goal that they have identified and chase that directly immediately impact the story. The second act of Star Wars (A New Hope for you youngsters.) Is the Flacon’s capture, the discovery and rescue of the princess and the escape from the Death Star. At each of the turns we understand exactly what it is the characters need to achieve, the cost of the fail to do that, and the escalation as obtaining the immediate goal brings further problems and troubles.

While things that happen here do affect the third act and the story’s eventual conclusion the characters are not looking off to that distant end but rather dealing with objective that if they do not meet them now there will be terrible consequences.

Keep your second act moving, as the writer keep your eye on the final prize the conclusion, but remember that the characters have to have immediate goals that matter to them now.