Recognizing an Act Turn (esp. in first draft)

writing
#1

Are there specific characteristics of an Act Turn Story Driver than can help you recognize it when it happens, especially while writing your first draft?

I’m pretty sure my Story Driver is Action, but I’m finding it hard sometimes to differentiate the Action that turns to the next Signpost from other Actions that happen.

Like I thought my First Act Turn (Slide from Signpost 1→2, Being → Becoming) was this one Action that definitely provoked a lot of Decisions[1]. But now that I have some distance on it – that was 90,000 words ago – I can see that the shift from Being to Becoming happens with a later Action[2]. The word count makes more sense too.

I’ve just finished writing what I thought was my midpoint. It’s what I planned as my midpoint from my first rough outline. But now I’m actually thinking the Bump from Becoming to Conceptualizing happened several scenes ago. Yet I’m not totally sure.

Since there can be other events of the Driver type in the middle of your acts, is the OS Signpost Type the main thing you look at to see where you “are” in the story? What about looking at other throughlines’ Signpost Types?

Footnotes with more story details in case you are interested… FEEL FREE TO SKIP! :slight_smile:

  1. IC Becca’s alien detector goes off in her professor’s office, forcing the professor to decide to kidnap her, and then forcing the MC to decide to break into the professor’s office to rescue her. Now that I’ve got some distance on that, I can see there’s still a lot of Being happening after those events, as they deal with the fallout of it. Conflict comes from the Firelion Club playing their roles as secret keepers and interrogators, from the MC college boy pretending he didn’t see anything, etc.

  2. It’s only when the interrogator draws a weapon on the MC out of the blue, provoking a response that proves he saw things he shouldn’t, that forces the Club President to decide to erase the MC’s memory… and forcing the IC to make the MC her recruit, to get him out of this mess. (Only the IC knows the memory-erasing drug might kill him, since she previously erased his memory and messed up the dose.)

#2

Oh what about, do you ever think of it like “okay, by that point they’d exhausted their ways of solving things with Becoming, so now this Action helps them move on to Conceptualizing”? And try to think of at what point the options seemed exhausted for that Type?

#3

Wait… you’re not done with your draft? Stop analyzing. Finish. Then start wondering.

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#4

[@jhull , or do we tell him there are no acts or act turns?]

#5

LOL, you know I read the transcripts for that podcast and I’m not exactly sure what to make of it all. I mean Go and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory…

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#6

Haha. I thought you might say that. I was hoping knowing the midpoint would help me guess how many words I had left!

Seems like whenever I get a bit stuck I turn toward analysis … when really what’s needed is a few days break from writing, some exercise and relaxation.

#7

I find it super interesting that they seem to not even know there is a qualitative difference between the act in a story, and the act in any given episode of a TV show (or a sub-story of Go), and a break forced by a commercial. But it’s not the first time I’ve run into this.

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#8

I suspect that is probably the curse of all Dram users.

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#9

I agree with @MWollaeger. Finish the draft, and then go back and analyse it.

I just finished a first draft that turned out much longer than I anticipated (or wanted), partly because I abandoned my loose outline pretty early on. So it starts as an Action story, then becomes a Decision story. If I stopped to analyse all of that while writing, I would have lost all motivation and the fun of it. I can do that later.

Sometimes, it’s better to write something wrong or a little ‘off’, than to write nothing at all. The first draft is the playground. Do anything and everything you want to do. You can fix it all later.

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#10

That’s because they’re constantly shifting context in that show. I can’t listen to it. I always load it up in my podcast player thinking I’m going to learn something, but all I ever learn is how to fight off depression. Not for me!

#11

I usually find one gem every couple episodes. It’s a low time/payout ratio. But, oy, the shifting contexts is exactly what drives me so crazy!

PS. For two guys who believe formula doesn’t exist, I have heard them say, “This is where the I Want song happens in a musical” way too many times.

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