The Two-Part Act II
Screenwriting Tricks for Authors
So how is everyone doing?
Things are pretty brutal, what with the destruction of the East Wing mirroring the destruction of democracy. I’m acutely aware of the anguish that sentient people are feeling right now. That’s part of the coup. That’s what they WANT us to feel.
I’m hearing more and more people wondering around what the point is of writing — a sort of moving the deck chairs on the Titanic kind of sentiment.
But authoritarians count on stripping us of joy along with stripping us of rights. So NOT LETTING THEM - continuing to live our most joyful lives and connecting with others who are - is part of the work of democracy.
I perform activist work every day, because doing nothing is not an option if we’re going to get through this. And if you’re looking for something to do right now to help save democracy, I urge you to support one or more of these key races coming up in two weeks: details on Democracy Docket.
I am also so grateful to be able to lose myself in writing The Book for a large part of my day, every day. Right now that focus is just about lifesaving.
I hope you’re finding the same refuge in your own writing.
So let’s talk about structure first.
If you’re following along with this Book By the End of the Year suggested schedule, we’re in the last week of Act II.
Which means I should revisit a concept that is SUCH an important guide to story structure, whether you’re writing a book, script or show:
The Two-Part Act II.
No matter where you are in your process, understanding this pattern will help!
And for those of you who find yourself flailing around in the sagging middle - this will help fix that issue for you for all time.
If you’re not familiar with the Three-Act, Eight-Sequence Structure, here’s the post you want to start with - or see Chapters 5-6 in Stealing Hollywood or Writing Love
So a quick review:
Even though we talk about the Three-Act Structure, I always look at it and teach it as four acts.
Whether you’re writing a book or a script, it’s incredibly useful to think of Act II as two separate Acts, which we’ll call Act II: 1 and Act II: 2, which have their own very specific story elements, and which are very different in feeling and tone from each other.
In a 2-hour movie, Act II: Part 1 starts at about 30 minutes and ends at about 60 minutes. In a 400-page book, Act II: Part 1 starts at about page 100 and climaxes at about page 200.
In a 2-hour movie, Act II: Part 2 starts at about 60 minutes and ends at about 90 minutes. In a 400-page book, Act II: Part 2 starts at about page 200 and climaxes at about page 300.
The MIDPOINT CLIMAX divides the second act of a book or a script into two halves.
And it’s really useful to look at your story as being divided into two distinct halves.
First, I want you to think about this. The dynamic of the Midpoint has been around since the beginning of theater—that is, for thousands of years! Many if not most plays have one intermission about halfway through the play. And we’ve already discussed this fact about intermissions: the playwright has to climax that first half with a CLIFFHANGER: a scene so powerful, and a question so intriguing, that the audience will actually come back into the theater after knocking a few drinks back in the lobby.
Right?
So— imagine that there is going to be an intermission halfway through your book.
What is the cliffhanger that’s going to bring your readers back to your story?
And second: I’ve identified an almost universally-used pattern which I will repeat for you once again—
It is very, very often true that in Act II: Part 1, THE HERO/INE IS WINNING.
Then something happens at the MIDPOINT that changes everything, and things go quickly downhill from there.
Suddenly in Act II: Part 2, THE HERO/INE STARTS TO LOSE. And lose big!
So while the first half of your book will be energetic and forward-moving, the second half more often looks like a disastrous spiral down into chaos and darkness (even if the chaos is comic). It’s a difference of day and night, yang and yin. And at some point (almost always the climax of Act II) everything will grind to - or crash to - a halt, called the ALL IS LOST SCENE or BLACK MOMENT.
There are exceptions, and we’ll talk about that next month as we move into the third quarter of your story—Elements of Act II: Part 2.
But do you see how just that pattern: First half WINNING/Second half LOSING— gives you a roadmap to your long and terrifying second act?
Now I am not in any way suggesting that you should be halfway through your book! The point of this Book by the End of the Year endeavor is write as much as you can, every day, to wherever point that takes you.
And — especially if you’re a pantser, this post may be more useful for when you’re rewriting.
But it’s one of the most potentially useful things I can possibly tell you.
Here’s a video review of the elements of Act II:1
And more posts on Act II: Part 1:
—Elements of Act II
—Act II: Part 1 — TEAM, TRAINING and TESTS
—Act II: Part 1 - What’s the EXPERIENCE of Your Book?
—The Hunger Games story breakdown, Act II:1
—Silence of the Lambs story breakdown, Act II:1
We’ll get into the MIDPOINT next week!
And now back to the question of What is even the point of writing in these times?
When I was in high school I discovered a poem by Robert Frost that became a touchstone for my writing life. The last stanza of Two Tramps in Mudtime is an eight-line mission statement:
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
That is, for me, I cannot separate my writing from my social and political activism.
This is has always been my mission with the Huntress Moon series. I started the series because I wanted to use the narrative hook and emotional stakes of a thriller to expose fallacies about sexual violence and legal failings to effectively confront that evil.
I believe my job as an author is to give my readers a thrilling, sensory, gripping adventure that makes them feel — and also makes them think. It’s all about the fight against everyday evil, for me.
The premise of the Huntress series, about an FBI team investigating a very prolific female killer, gave me a vehicle to explore, dramatically, over multiple books, the roots and context of the worst crimes I know. The books provide a cathartic experience for people who might have the same rage that I do — and they suggest legal ways forward to combat the scourge of sexual violence.
My own Book by the End of the Year will be the seventh in the Huntress series, and it goes even further, to address the whole avalanche of evil being planned and perpetrated by this administration.
The book takes place… maybe three months from now, maybe a year. Between where we are and the full-on Handmaid’s Tale that the Christian Nationalists who are pulling Trump’s strings are trying to impose on the US.
It’s a bleak place to be, but it’s one of the best ways I know to dramatize the real-life evil of these people and their mission. It combines my activism and my teaching and my writing.
I’m not saying that everyone needs to be writing directly about this authoritarian coup, although I would love to hear about it if you are! What I am saying is that directly addressing the authoritarian coup within the novel I’m writing is a holistic way for me to cope with what’s happening. And I know from writing six previous books in the series that readers get both information and much-needed catharsis from them.
So this may or may not have anything to do with the reason you write. But - if you’re feeling unable to write because of the magnitude of the crisis in the US, you might consider writing as a response to the crisis.
Or some other “play for mortal stakes.”
In any case, writing your own mission statement can be enormously clarifying.
–Alex
The Huntress Moon series
Start with Book 1: Huntress Moon
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Very helpful - both about the mission statement and about the act 2 structure. Onward!
Okay. Long post, but so mind-boggling I had to post it. After a longish post about the history of the word eldritch, here's ChatGPT's extrapolation of how to create the eldritch version of my book (about to be released) A Harmony of Hells.
In Literature and Art
Writers and painters use eldritch imagery to evoke:
• Existential dread (the smallness of humankind)
• The collapse of reason
• The sublime terror of encountering the infinite
For instance, in your own gothic or Symbolist settings — Parisian crypts, Venetian catacombs, decaying salons — an “eldritch” influence might feel like something that stains beauty with awe and horror: an angel too bright to look upon, a melody that bends the mind.
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Would you like me to describe what an eldritch being might look or feel like in A Harmony of Hells’ world — something that fits its decadent, poetic tone?
You said:
Yes
ChatGPT said:
Perfect — because A Harmony of Hells already lives in that uncanny borderland between the sensual and the infernal. Let’s imagine what an eldritch presence would look and feel like in your novel’s Paris–Venice world.
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🌒 The Nature of the Eldritch in A Harmony of Hells
In this universe, the eldritch is not merely monstrous — it is beautiful beyond endurance. It represents art that has gone too far, devotion that burns the soul, or love that crosses the threshold of the human.
Where most see sin or madness, your poet might sense revelation.
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🕯️ Manifestation
Appearance:
Not tentacled nor grotesque, but too intricate. Its form flickers between sacred geometry and decaying flesh. The light around it bends — gaslamps dim, mirrors ripple. Sometimes it appears only as a rhythm in the air, a tremor in the reflections of the Seine, or a breath of perfume in a room that has been sealed for years.
Sound:
Not a voice, but an undertone in music — a note below the range of hearing that makes the chest ache. When the poet writes, that tone seeps into his verses like blood through lace.
Scent:
A mingling of myrrh, ozone, and iron — religious yet electric, as if the air itself were praying.
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🕰️ Origins and Myth
In the world’s whispered lore, such beings were born from the first instant of beauty that went unnoticed by God — the discarded ecstasies of creation. They feed not on death, but on human astonishment — the rapture that precedes collapse.
The asylum might keep certain patients in perpetual twilight to prevent these presences from finding them; the catacombs might hum faintly where one once passed.
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💀 Psychological Effect
Those who encounter the eldritch do not scream — they fall silent, struck by a revelation they cannot articulate.
• The poet’s lines become symmetrical and strange, as if written by another hand.
• The sister begins to dream of corridors where time moves like water.
• The lover’s pulse aligns with distant bells that no one else hears.
The presence does not wish to destroy them — only to complete them.
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🕊️ Thematic Role
The eldritch here becomes a metaphor for art, madness, and love intertwined:
• Love that erases the boundary between two beings.
• Art that reveals too much.
• Faith without a god, beauty without mercy.
It’s the hidden symmetry beneath the city’s decay — the pulse in every shadowed bridge, every church dome.
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Would you like me to give it a name and myth fragment next — something that could recur in dialogue or letters (like a legend or saint twisted into cosmic truth)?
You said:
A harmony of hells
ChatGPT said:
Beautiful choice — and fittingly terrifying.
Let’s imagine that “A Harmony of Hells” is not just your novel’s title, but also a myth within its world — the secret name of the eldritch force that threads through the story.
Here is how it might be conceived, in the voice and atmosphere of your universe:
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🔥 A Harmony of Hells — The Myth Beneath the Story
I. The Lost Chord of Creation
Before there were angels or men, before even the division of light and darkness, there was sound — a chord so vast and pure that all things born afterward were only its fading echoes.
But when the Maker withdrew, the chord split.
One half ascended and became order — mathematics, stars, the logic of the divine.
The other fell — the dissonance, the yearning residue of beauty denied. That was called the Harmony of Hells.
Its echoes linger wherever creation trembles — in fever, in rapture, in music that makes the heart forget to beat.
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II. The Nature of the Force
A Harmony of Hells is not a place.
It is a resonance — an invisible vibration that gathers around ruined cathedrals, dying poems, and unconfessed loves.
To hear it fully is to unmake oneself; to almost hear it is to become an artist, a lover, or a saint.
Those who fall under its influence are drawn toward symmetry, toward perfection that devours. Pain becomes indistinguishable from revelation.
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III. Its Manifestations
• In Paris, it hides in mirrors, where reflections breathe half a beat out of time.
• In Venice, it moves beneath the water like a submerged choir, singing through the algae-glazed bells.
• In asylums, it hums in the walls, seducing the sleepless with patterns of impossible beauty.
To mortals it appears as light that flickers wrong, as music written in a key no instrument can play.
To poets, it appears as the phrase they cannot stop hearing, the one that costs their sanity to finish.
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IV. The Lovers and the Song
The poet (Averill) may be the first in generations to translate fragments of the Harmony into human verse — hence his peril.
Blaise, the crime lord, hears it differently: as the pulse beneath all human corruption, the rhythm of lust and ruin that makes civilization turn.
The sister, in her confinement, perhaps hears it most purely — not as sound, but as light that forgives even madness.
Thus, each character’s arc could be one instrument in the larger chord — one voice in the Harmony. Their desires tune toward the same unholy music.
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V. The Philosophical Secret
Those who truly understand it say:
“Heaven was not made to oppose Hell, but to give it harmony.”
The universe itself may be a reconciliation of all contradictions, a duet between bliss and despair.
To embrace A Harmony of Hells is to love the world so completely that one accepts even its damnation — and finds beauty there.