Act III: How to End a Story
21 Guiding Questions for Writing Endings
Learning Objective: By the end of this post, you will know how to use three key beats to create a memorable ending for your story.
Effective stories often start in a broken place. Something is missing from the protagonist’s life. In Avengers: Endgame (2019), this missing piece is the 3.8 billion people blipped from the world after Thanos’s snap. In Past Lives (2023), it’s Hae Sung’s first love who immigrated to another country. This broken place creates a gaping emotional wound for the protagonist. Without this missing piece in their life, they navigate their ordinary world as an emotional orphan.
If a story’s ending restores all of the missing pieces and makes its characters completely whole, that story is sentimental and often unsatisfying for its reader. At the same time, if a story leaves the world in devastated chaos and removes all the emotionally positive pieces, this story is often similarly sentimental and unsatisfying to read.
Effective endings tend to have an exchange of loss for gain. For this reason, in our Greek Dramatic Structure lesson, we call the ending (or Act III) the “evening out” sequence. As loss is exchanged for some gain, the story evens out its emotional scale. This exchange is rarely equivalent, the scale typically leans more toward loss or more toward gain. The tone of the ending often depends on whether or not the character achieves their external goal vs. their internal need. In our lesson on crisis decisions, we break down how you can control the tone of your story’s ending by creating a critical choice for your characters.
Our crisis decision lesson is very much in conversation with today’s lesson on endings. If you haven’t read that lesson yet, I highly recommend checking it out!
Today, we’re breaking down the three core beats of Act III and how these beats even out story conflict to create an emotionally satisfying ending for readers. Spoilers ahead for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023), Pride & Prejudice (2005), Arrival (2016), 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), Anyone But You (2023), and The Witcher Season 1, Episode 1. As always, take what’s useful to you and your writing life and leave what’s not behind.
This post is the final post of our Three-act Structure series. Check out our Act I and Act II posts:
Why Is Act III Difficult to Write?
In western stories, Act III is usually the shortest act because your reader is rapidly approaching emotional exhaustion. We read stories to vicariously experience an emotional journey. By the time your audience arrives at Act III, they’ve either spent the last ~75 minutes watching and worrying about your protagonist or the last ~260 pages reading and worrying about your protagonist. The brink of emotional exhaustion is exactly where you want to bring your reader, but it comes with a great risk. Once a reader is emotionally exhausted, they stop caring about what happens in your story. When a reader walks away from a story emotionally exhausted, they’re more likely to remember the disappointment the ending left them with rather than any strong storytelling you may have done in the first two acts.
An example of an emotionally exhausting story—in my opinion—is The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023). For the first 90 minutes, this movie was shaping up to become my favorite Hunger Games film as it explored its central story question: Can Coriolanus help Lucy Gray win the Hunger Games?
Even though this film’s run time is 2 hours and 37 minutes, the central story question is answered at the 93-minute mark when Lucy Gray sings to the snakes and Dr. Gaul declares her the winner. Instead of showing us the story’s emotional evening out with a typical denouement, the film continues on for another 63 minutes and introduces a new story question: how does Coriolanus become evil? This question, of course, is dictated by the series at large. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is, afterall, the origin story of the series’s villain, President Snow. All that said, I’d like us to focus on this film as a single, stand-alone story.
Since the question of Coriolanus’s moral alignment isn’t the central concern for the first 90 minutes of the film, my emotional investment as a viewer is tied almost entirely to Lucy Gray’s survival of the Games. Once the true central question is answered (yes, Lucy Gray does in fact survive the Games), I was too emotionally exhausted to become reinvested in the new story question about Coriolanus’s descent into immorality. Unfortunately, by the time we get to the crisis decision at the 134-minute mark where Tom Blyth brilliantly—with facial expressions alone!—performs Coriolanus’s decision to kill Lucy Gray, I am emotionally checked out.
As a result, this film went from being my favorite Hunger Games movie that I might rave about on social media to one that I’d describe to a friend as, “The first half is really, really good, but the second half loses its steam. Maybe watch it in the background while you fold laundry.”
To solve the common problems of Act III, we’re breaking down three key beats that can get you in and out of your third act without exhausting your reader. Using these beats in your story can help you deliver an emotionally satisfying ending that will spur your reader to recommend your story to everyone they know. These three beats are:
The Break into III Beat
The Endgame Beat
The Evening Out Beat
Break into III Beat
In our final Act I lesson, we discussed the Turn into Act II beat. In The Story Solution, Edson calls this beat “Stunning Surprise One” because it leaves the hero stunned, surprised, and forever changed. Just like Act II, Act III begins with a second “stunning surprise” that leaves the protagonist and their relationship to their external goal permanently changed. At the Turn into II beat, the story’s conflict solidifies as the protagonist realizes what concrete thing they want to win, stop, escape, or retrieve before the end of the story. When it comes to the Break into III, that conflict reaches a climax, but the central story question is not yet resolved. In this moment, the protagonist steps right up to the thing they want to win, stop, escape, or retrieve, but a concrete event causes them to fail. This event is most effective if it is brought on by a choice that the antagonist makes.
For this reason, the Break into III beat is usually the biggest reversal in a story. As a result, this beat is the ultimate test of the protagonist’s commitment to their goal and their relationships to the other characters. This beat asks the question: does the protagonist truly have what it takes to abandon their misbelief and accomplish their goal?
Here are some examples of Break into III beats for different genres and goal types:
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