Introducing The Dynamic Three-Act Story Structure™
Coming Soon: Tutorials and group discussions to elevate your writing skills
July, 2025
Are you struggling to draft your novel? Soon, we’ll open enrollment for tutorials to master this storytelling structure to elevate your writing skills and help you complete your novel with greater ease.
Developed by CM Torres, The Dynamic Three-Act Story Structure™ combines the elements of the classic Three-Act Structure story beats with the sequence structure of cinematic screenplays.
What it is: It synchronizes the pacing and the rising and falling action of great novels and screenplays to create a compelling emotional journey for the audience.
What it’s not: A prescriptive formula for characters and plot.
An Intuitive Structure with Benefits
It provides prompts for plotters to develop a story outline.
It helps discovery writers (who do not outline) check their work’s structure and pace as they write.
It guides all writers through the main objectives at each stage of the story.
It helps minimize writer’s block and provides a structure so the scenes can be written in any order while keeping concept placeholders.
It provides guidance to find possible causes when a chapter or section of the novel isn’t working. For example:
Are there three mini-acts in each sequence?
Are the beat/sequence combinations ordered effectively?
Is the pacing too slow or too fast at certain parts of the novel?
Is it missing any of the essential objectives described in the beats?
Understanding the tables
The blue and yellow sections provide plot targets for each part of the structure pairings.
The green section provides pacing targets.
PREVIEW: ACT ONE TABLE
THE DYNAMIC THREE-ACT STORY STRUCTURE
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How did you create this story structure?
A: I’ve lost track of the time since I started hinting to my friends and family about “The Novel I’m Working On”.
My Spanish-speaking readers who have read short stories and poems I’ve written in Spanish have been inquiring about my progress and I realized that thinking about the plot and the characters and jotting down notes that have piled up in a dusty little basket —or a desktop folder— is considered dabbling, not working.
It had been five years of dabbling. Five years! Why didn’t I enroll in an MFA program?
It all started with a story idea that infiltrated my consciousness while on a (now perpetual) work hiatus during the spread of COVID-19.
Between the early pandemic isolation and my propensity to only try new things when I’m sure I can do them better than most, I started learning more about the ins and outs of storytelling from scholarly podcasts and online classroom lectures.
I got hooked on learning. Writing could wait.
I couldn’t stop searching for new sources of knowledge, which made it easy to keep putting off applying what I was learning.
Before I knew it, I was learning a lot about writing screenplays. That became an addictive rabbit hole to follow.
Then it occurred to me: Why not build a new structure for my novel that’s well-suited for easy adaptation to screenplay? I set-out to layer the scenes from the classic Three-Act Story Structure used for novels over the sequences of the Three-Act Story Structure used for screenplays.
As I started to make progress outlining “The Novel I’m Working On in 2024, I used my education and experience to create The Dynamic Three-Act Story Structure™.
Q: What’s the difference between a story beat and a screenplay sequence?
A: Story beats are the universal, essential building blocks of plot and character arc development that make a story coherent and functional.
Screenplay sequences are made up of mini-arcs that include a beginning (action), middle (reaction and complications), and end (resolution or new plan). The mini-arcs center on the characters’ situational action-reaction and are also known as “character beats”.
The character beats in screenplay sequences progress toward the story’s main character’s arc, that is, their transformation at the conclusion of the story.
Q: Is each story beat always paired with a single sequence in the Dynamic Three-Act Story Structure™?
A: No. In the classic Three-Act Story Structure, Act 1 takes up 25% of the plot, Act 2 takes up 50% of the plot, and Act 3 takes up the remaining 25% of the plot. However, the pacing isn’t linear.
In the Dynamic Three-Act Story Structure™, some beats in Act 2 are developed and transitioned in a single sequence while others develop across multiple sequences to raise the stakes for the main character and keep the reader immersed.
Q: If I follow the Dynamic Three-Act Story Structure™, will my story be predictable? Will it limit my ability to be creative?
A: A story structure doesn’t make stories predictable or uncreative. What makes stories predictable or unique is how the building blocks of a story structure are laid out to tell the story.
To give you an analogy, if five people are given the same new box of Lego® blocks and six hours to use all the pieces to create something, the odds that any two people will use the same exact color and piece configuration in the same exact way is near impossible.
Using the same building blocks doesn’t determine creativity. It’s how they’re used.
Q: Where do I find material about how to use The Dynamic Three-Act Story Structure™?
A: Starting in November, 2025, I am opening a subscriber-only Substack dedicated to tutorials and newsletters introducing topics like:
The structure and deep-dive analysis of each structure pairing
Case studies breaking down successful movies into the structure pairings
Case studies analyzing why unsuccessful movies failed, using the Dynamic Three-Act Story Structure™ as a guide to find weaknesses
Discovering the best writing approach for you
Chapter length and transition
Using literary devices
Genre
Tropes
Editing
And much, more more!
Q: How can I subscribe?
A: You can subscribe to an All-access membership to The Dynamic Three-Act Story Structure™ tutorials and resources starting in November, 2025.
All subcribers of this free publication—Tea, Book & Hammock—will receive invitations to enroll in the tutorials before they are launched.
The subscription will be open to writers worldwide who are interested in elevating their novel writing skills.
If you are not a subscriber of Tea, Book & Hammock yet, click here to receive original short stories and essays, and notifications about the launch of The Dynamic Three-Act Story Structure™ tutorials.