Here’s another little snippet of screenwriting advice in this series on screenwriting books from Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey.  Make of it what you will:

“Act Two is a long stretch for the writer and the audience, up to an hour in an average feature film.  You can look at the three-act structure as a dramatic line stretched across two major points of tension, the act breaks.  Like a circus tent hanging on its poles, structure is subject to gravity – the waning of the audience’s attention in the time between these peaks of tension.  A story that has no central moment of tension may sag like a circus tent that needs an extra support pole in the middle.  Act Two is an hour-long chunk of your movie, or a hundred pages of your novel.  It needs some kind of structure to hold it in tension.”

“The words crisis, critic, and critical come from a Greek word that means “to separate”.  A crisis is an event that separates the two halves of the story.  After crossing this zone, which is often the borderland of [literal or metaphorical] death, the hero is literally or metaphorically reborn and nothing will ever be the same.”

“The simple secret of the [crisis] is this: Hereoes must die so that they can be reborn … In some way in every story, heroes face death or someting like it: their greatest fears, the failure of an enterprise, the end of a relationship, the death of an old personality.”

“Here the fortunes of the hero hit bottom in a direct confrontation with his greatest fear … The [crisis] is a black moment for the audience, as we are held in suspense and tension, not knowing if he will live or die … Our emotions are temporarily depressed so that they can be revived … The result of this is a feeling of elation and exhilaration.”

“Why do so many stories seem to have two climaxes or death-and-rebirth ordeals, one near the middle and another just before the of the story?”

The hero comes through the first ordeal, the “crisis”, committed to change.  The second ordeal, the “climax”, tests whether he has sincerely changed and what he has learnt from his experiences.  The climax is often the final, decisive confrontation with the villain, and the danger is usually on the broadest scale of the entire story when the stakes at their highest.