The third act of a story is defined by resolution. The arc of a story is usually quite predictable. Now, what I do when I’m telling a story is take what happens prior to where a third act is supposed to be and pull it down. Further and further until you cannot bare to look. It’s beyond even the macabre interest in an accident scene. We dissolve into what we were, and I dissolve into the pain of these characters, but we rarely have an inkling of what we could become.
The second act creates the problem to solve. There is no third act in my story because I don’t have any solutions. It keeps happening and happening. And no one is wrong. And there’s no escape. There is no plan B. This is just how it is. Worse. This is who you are, who I am. Everyone taps out. Everyone begs with clasped fists. No one is spared. And everything burns. And every tap and clasp will be remembered but ignored.
I feel like my writing is more cubic Picasso or like Mondrian’s evolution from landscapes to lines than Renaissance detail. It’s arrogant to say but I see The Guernica when I close my eyes after finishing a good paragraph. I know I can do it because I’ve seen it. And I’ve always been more interested in the reduction of forms than layers of perfect replication.
I’m writing about a fictional character, can’t you tell?