This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the Helping Writers Podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode, Understanding the Underworld of A Story's Third Act.

A story's third act is unique.

We often think of the third act in terms of its being climactic,

and therefore full of excitement and high stakes. And it often is, but ultimately the third act fulfills a much more symbolic

function within a story. Simply put, it is the proving ground for all the character has learned and

accomplished in the second act. Even more than that, it is representative of the human psyche's deepest levels of integration.

It is, in many ways, the underworld of your entire story.

These past few weeks we have been exploring the symbolic lens through which we can see a story's first act as its normal world and the second act as its adventure world. Now, I've used these metaphors for the first and second acts for a long time,

based on my own distillation of the hero's journeys, ordinary world, and the

adventurous quest that symbolizes its central conflict. As mentioned in the

previous two episodes in this little series, these terms are specific to the

archetype of hero. And yet I still find them useful as umbrella terms for

understanding story structure in all types of story.

When I first set down to write on this subject in what was intended to be a single episode,

I realized that if the first and second acts were worlds

unto themselves, then of course symmetry demanded the third act must be a world as well. Today's episode is an overview of what I

came up with in this regard. So first just a reminder of where we're at in this

series. So far we have covered the normal world of the

first act and the adventure world of the second act. Today we're discussing

the underworld of the third act and next week we will talk about the new normal world

of the resolution.

...