Summer Writing Project - Act Two Planning: Oh, the Places You'll Go

Now that we are out of Act One and have a mission in mind of what our hero needs to accomplish…what now?

We leave the world of the familiar.

Let's see what that looks like. We will set out to get where we know we need to go, and maybe initially our character has an idea of what they need to do, but very quickly they are going to feel like a fish out of water.

This is an opportunity to introduce a new location that is unlike anything we've seen before and at least one new character who is going to keep things interesting.

Let's look at Aladdin. The big moments that brought us into Act Two were going into the Cave of Wonders, finding the lamp, and getting betrayed so he became stuck.

It's hard for me to think of a more fun B-story character to introduce into a film at this point than Robin Williams' Genie.

Something to remember is that when we introduce new characters, they aren't just cardboard cutouts who are only there to serve the main character's mission.

In order to keep them interesting, the Act Two B-Story characters need to have their own wants and desires that they will try to go after as well.

For instance, Genie wanted to be free from having to answer to whoever held the lamp. The story does such a great job of wrestling with what he wants and how that intersects with what Aladdin is after.

Aladdin promises that he will free Genie, and we as the audience get the new tension of 'will he or won't he live up to the promise by the end?' It makes it so that the story gets richer as we continue on and we learn more about our hero and how much character they have.

And also, we get a lot of fun new locations. For example (yes, more Disney examples):

• The Little Mermaid

  • Ariel gets her legs and heads to the surface.

• Beauty and the Beast

  • Belle discovers the enchanted castle and all of the people who had been transformed.

• Tangled

  • Rapunzel finally leaves her tower with Flynn Ryder and discovers the Snuggly Duckling musical crew.

Aladdin is actually an example of how the Fun and Games section doesn't always have to introduce a new location, and we can return to the location of Agrabah, but something major has to be different.

Aladdin is now Prince Ali and gets to go into the palace when he had only been looking at it from the outside... so in some ways we see different locations within the primary location.

But this part of Act Two needs to be a lot of fun. It's an opportunity to delight the reader (and yourself) with unexpected twists and turns that are new and exciting to our hero, but nothing feels too dangerous or crazy yet. Unfortunately that starts to creep in later into Act Two, but for now, let's give our hero a little bit of a break and let them explore without too many negative consequences.

Flying Into Act Two - No Turning Back

In my book, The Wind Merchant, our hero has accidentally caused his floating city to start sinking, and in that world, people can't survive beneath the clouds. So he has to leave the city in his airship and find something that can save his city.

Act One ended with him flying away, and he couldn't go back and leave things like they were or else his city would sink. That's another thing to note about moving between Acts One and Two is that the hero can't go back to how things were before. That door needs to be shut and the only way to go is forward.

As soon as they leave the smaller floating city, they hit a big metropolis that is so much bigger than they had ever seen, and soon they meet someone who is all too willing to be a tour guide for them and our heroes have to decide if she is actually helpful or maybe has other motives.

Another thing about B-story characters is that they are an opportunity to explain things to the characters about how the bigger world works in a way that doesn't feel like you are info-dumping everything on the reader.

You can allow the information to come out naturally instead of giving pages and pages of text explaining how the world works. We'll cover that next month in the writing portion of the lessons.

But this is supposed to be one of the most fun things to write in the whole book, so be sure to brainstorm through all of the really cool things you can put into the story that are different or bigger or kind of upside down from the world we established first.

Meanwhile, all of these steps need to take us forward toward the goals that the hero has still, so let's make sure this part doesn't feel too much like a distraction or a detour. They need to go to these fun locations for a reason, so they probably shouldn't just stumble into it and wander around.

Activity: Drawing a Map

I'm not an artist myself, but I have found it incredibly helpful to sketch out a rough map of where the characters need to go. And sometimes seeing that map will spark ideas of what could happen in those places.

Let's try the rice map activity. If you don't have rice, there are plenty of other things you can use like dirt or sand or something small enough that it can bounce around on a page a little without getting too messy.

But the idea is that you pour some rice on a piece of paper. Then you move it around into however many piles you want, and then trace over those to create the land masses once you're happy with how it looks.

You can make islands, or show where a river would run through, and if there are any particularly bigger parts of the pile, you can remember those are the mountains.

Then if you're having fun with that, put the rice back in the bag and start filling in where there might be towns, or forests, or deserts.

After that, give them some names, and figure out where the story starts, and where it needs to go.

You just might find some inspiration once it becomes a little more real in your head where your characters have to travel and how they have to get there.

If everything stays within a neighborhood or a town, just draw out some streets and where stores or important buildings might be, add some railroad tracks and maybe a lake or river, and see where your imagination takes you.

Also, this will help the world feel a bit more lived in if the characters have to consider how far they have to travel or how they might get somewhere next.

Hope this helps, and I hope it was fun!