Good Morning everyone and welcome to the morning task. I am sure you can guess what it is. If you guessed breaking out Act three into parts then you are correct. Don’t worry it won’t be a bad as Act 2 because that was where the monster section of the plot was. Act three involves solving the final crisis (or not depending on the tale you are telling) and wrapping up our loose ends as we move towards our final conclusion. Our final conclusion is the sentence we put as out break out for act three. I will pout the three that we have for Bob Below as well as the break outs for Acts 1 and 2. For yours I suggest giving everything a good read through before starting. Remember these are the broad strokes. We will get into the details as we progress, but for now, these are just the main points. So, in our example, we start with our three sentences for Bob which were…
Act 1: Bob, is working at the Garrison Family Lumber Yard and his father-in Law does not like the changes he has made to the management.
Act 2: Bob fights with his father-in law about management, he tries to pass duties onto family who don’t want the responsibility, he finds out someone is embezzling from the company and that his wife is having an affair and he gets fired.
Act 3: Bob gets divorced and leaves to start a new life.
So we all know that Bob Gets divorced and leaves to start a new life. At least how we wrote it at the beginning. If you remember our break out things changed. I had bob start divorce proceedings while still working for the family company and the crisis we ended on was his father in law trying to pin the embezzlement on him. So we are going to change Bob’s Act three sentence to.
Act 3: Bob proves he didn’t embezzle the funds and leaves to start his new life.
That works out better for the story as we have it now. And before we start to look at the details of Act 3, we have the break outs from the first two acts (remember we are keeping our numbers sequential)…
Act 1
1: The start of the Story. Bob is working for his Father-in-law as he had a heart attack and there was no one else available to keep the family business afloat.
2:The issue with the everyday world: Bob went to school to be a Marine Biologist but even though he takes small jobs in his field when he can, he feels that more and more of his life is becoming about the Lumber Yard.
3: Inciting Incident: Bob had to change systems and processes when he started taking over because the business was heading for bankruptcy and now that they are in the black Henry insists on going back to the way things were and making things more miserable (actively miserable) for Bob at work.
4:Chocies: His FiL hints (in several unsubtle ways) that he should quit giving him the opportunity of walking away.
5: Second thoughts: Bob realizes that if he leaves everything will go back to being run the way it was and the business will fail in a year or two.
6:Decision:Bob decides he will train some of the others so they will understand the system and then once they can manage things competently he will pull himself out of the company so it doesn’t just collapse.
Act 2: Complications
7:Bob makes a list of the family working for the company looking at strengths and weaknesses so he can see who to pass which jobs to.
8:Obstacle #1: He finds out that most of the family wants to be seen to be in charge without actually doing the work.
9:Plan to deal with Obstacle #1: Bob figures if he has the system set up so that the underlings take care of things and the ‘in charge’ family only has to sign off so they look like they are the one with authority it would work best so he decides to shift the systems, protocols and checklists so it is ‘foolproof’ and easy to manage.
10:Obstacle 2: Bob finds out one (or more) of the family is embezzling.
11:Plan for dealing with Obstacle 2:Bob puts in a system of checks and balances closing up the avenue for theft and will be telling FiL about it so he can decide how he wants to handle the theft now that it has been stopped.
12:Midpoint (twist): Bob discovers that if his FiL fires him than according to the contract he signed there is a hefty severance package coming his way that his FiL does not want him to have and is therefore trying to make him quit instead of firing him.
13:Dealing with the Midpoint: Bob realizes that his work will never be valued and that while he will reassign duties he will make his FiL fire him.
14:Obstacle 3:Bob finds out his wife is having an affair with George.
15:Plan for Obstacle 3: Bob confronts his wife about the affair and they decide to separate.
16:Obstacle 4: FiL goes in with the help of Chuck and removes the systems Bob put in place to keep them stable and the pilfering down.
17: Plan/deal with Obstacle #4: Bob decides that as he is getting divorced then it is no longer his concern and he doesn’t fight them removing the system. He will be leaving anyway so let them go down the tubes.
18: Crisis: FiL decides that Bob is the one who is embezzling funds from the company.
And now we start Act 3 and our Resolution of Bob’s thrilling tale. It is all about descending action. Think of it as coming through the crisis and wrapping up loose ends.
The first point we start with is actually Coming through the crisis. The crisis we left Bib with is his FiL (or at this point former FiL trying to pin the embezzlement on him.
19:Comes through the crisis:Bob has the paperwork to prove he is not the one who embezzled and that Chuck is.
Point twenty is going to be interesting. This is where you decide what is going to fall into place and what is going to be left behind. It is helpful you look back at the plans to deal with obstacles from Act 2 here. Go through the list and see what it is you need to make sure is done. Bob’s plans were…
Plan to deal with Obstacle #1: Bob figures if he has the system set up so that the underlings take care of things and the ‘in charge’ family only has to sign off so they look like they are the one with authority it would work best so he decides to shift the systems, protocols and checklists so it is ‘foolproof’ and easy to manage.
Plan for dealing with Obstacle 2:Bob puts in a system of checks and balances closing up the avenue for theft and will be telling FiL about it so he can decide how he wants to handle the theft now that it has been stopped.
Dealing with the Midpoint: Bob realizes that his work will never be valued and that while he will reassign duties he will make his FiL fire him.
Plan for Obstacle 3: Bob confronts his wife about the affair and they decide to separate.
Plan/deal with Obstacle #4: Bob decides that as he is getting divorced then it is no longer his concern and he doesn’t fight them removing the system. He will be leaving anyway so let them go down the tubes.
Now if you look at these, they are more or less obsolete. Bob no longer cares for the company and what becomes of it, so the earlier plans are null. But we are still trying to get him to his new life. So point twenty is how we start moving him into the new life. Look at the changes that dealing with the obstacles created. With our Bob Example…
20: Falling into Place: Having divorced his wife, Bob gets an apartment. He is still determined to make his father in law fire him so he stays working at the Lumber yard after he is cleared of charges. He also starts looking around for jobs in Marine Biology, quietly.
Which makes 21 the wrap up of the last points we need to end the current situation and get us into the next stage (in other words nearer our conclusion.) So with Bob…
21. Bob is fired and his FiL is forced to give him the severance package.
And finally we have 22, You can call this the wrap up or the Denouement it can even be called an epilogue if you want to think about it. But this is the point where you launch your protagonist into their new normal.
For Bob…
22:Wrap Up: Bob’s Bob gets a job near his family, buys a boat and sails off into the sunset.
And that is the break out of Act 3. It felt like a lot less than Act 2 didn’t it? I know it also felt like you might have left out a lot. If you are like me then there were a lot of details missing. A lot of things from your initial idea break out that you want to put back in. I know. I have a long list myself. But soon…soon we will be adding them in. We just needed to get the broad strokes of the frame down before we started adding in the little bits. But for now, relax. You have completed todays task and are on your way. So take a breath, set it aside and we will start the next task in the morning.
Ten til Midnight 