I’m trying to follow the three-act structure with the book I’m currently planning. This is the first time I’ve actually done that — my original idea for the story skipped several months of time to get to the more interesting parts. Feels kinda lazy of me to ask this, but I’m not sure where else to take this question: how do I make an interesting first act when even I don’t care about the main character’s life before the inciting incident?
Then why should we - the readers - care about your character at all if you don't care? Skipping time is not really a problem; I've read many books and seen many films that gloss over certain periods of time. One hero story I enjoy starts with the MC growing up. It starts with a few incidents of his early childhood, then the second chapter begins with "The seasons passed, as they will," and continues with events of the MCs early teens ten years later - which is where the story itself begins. In another novel the MC begins a long journey and the story picks up weeks later. The intervening time are chapters about other characters. My own WIP starts with "meet the characters" and then jumps months ahead to the "meaty" parts. In fact, a key incident is not narrated, but described by several characters in an almost Rashomon fashion, although it's more the different characters relating their individual perspectives. It's not lazy to "time skip;" drama is life with the boring parts cut out. I recently drove from Connecticut to Texas. It would be boring as hell to describe my journey, but a few incidents that occurred along do make for some fun anecdotes.
The first act is mostly the story underway. There's just a little sliver before the inciting incident. It sounds like you're stretching that part out as the entire first act. Sorry this chart is so big, but it shows a good average example.
I've tried to find a more exact chart for this. I found this great link, which is at a YA author's site. She seems nice enough. I'm not sure if she assembled this herself or what. It's phenomenal work though. I recognize a lot of this Arch Plot. I've read most of the books she has as sources, or I have them on my shelf and have looked at them some. Other books mention it too (The Story Grid, for example). This thing is pretty awesome. What's nice is that it shows you a simple 3-6-3 structure for the acts. Basically Act 2 is twice as big as Acts 1 & 3, and you can break those into thirds. The first third of Act 1 is where the inciting incident happens. The twelve total parts are because of the Hero's Journey outline, which seems to be the container for all this. Fair enough . . . So acting as a guidepost, about 1/12th of the way through you have your inciting incident. If your book is 300 pages long (modest novel), by page 25 you should have turned the MC's world upside down. (More or less. It's not an exact recipe.) The point of those first pages is to establish the stasis of the character, either the world they're protecting (here's where the hobbits have the party in the movie) or the life the character is trying to escape (Edward Norton's misery at work in Fight Club). You're establishing what the MC is fighting for or against, what they're rejecting or struggling to save. You're showing the baseline. The change is already underway, and then around page 20-25, they have to face it. Really from page 1, it's in motion but the character doesn't know it. (Gandalf is on the way to visit, Tyler Durden has appeared). And then the MC faces the inciting incident when it's defined. They go on a trip with the Ring. They move into Tyler's house. Etc. These aren't set in stone. Every story breaks the outline form somewhere, a little or a lot. So another big picture. (If this turns out absurd, I'm going to embed/link it somehow. Give me a sec . . .) Spoiler: Yeah, it was crazy. Maybe visit her site. It's an even bigger picture there. It looks like a 4K pic. It gives the terms from about 10 different writing books defining the stages. The point is, wrap up that inciting incident quick.
As others have mentioned, your inciting incident is very early in the narrative. Like end of chapter one stuff. The white walker attack in ASOFAI, the selection in Hunger Games, any massive attack/big explosion in (insert Random Tom Clancy). The bulk of the backstory and other lore/history things then occur concurrently with the unfolding of events. You don't need to slather it on thick first and then begin the story. And you're totally fine "not caring" or not exploring a character's backstory extensively. Plenty of stories do that. You need a little bit for depth and context, but no more than that. Somebody (Stephen King?) once said everyone has a backstory but most of them aren't very interesting. If they were, they wouldn't be backstory.
I wrote a story where I had a similar experience. I don't necessarily stick toor aim for a three-act structure, but sometimes it sort of happens. The story struggled and was stupid in for the first third of it. But then it started to get good. And I thought the last third was killer. For me, I came to the realization that I started the story in the wrong place. I took my ending and started it from there. It came out better than I could have thought. Of course, I wanted to be able to fix things somehow vs. rewriting pretty much everything, but it just wasn't going to happen that way for this story for me. I'm not saying this is what you have to do, but consider all your option and possible solutions. It does sound like you're starting your story in the wrong place, though.
In one of my novels, my MC had a past life that was critical to the story, but was not very interesting. After several beta readers pointing out the mundane prose, I had to delete two chapters and insert the MC's past events into a back story.
You are far from the only person not to care much about the first act. I've struggled with the same problem (over many different stories) for years. I think it's a part of writing most everyone struggles with ah some point. You've got a lot of great input already, but I'll throw in my ten cents. My suggestion would be taking a step back from the story and ask, 'when does this really begin?'. If the answer is the same as it is now, then keep your skip forward and get to the good parts. You might throw in a chapter that covers the time between, giving the MC a chance to really develop in the eyes of the reader, but that's your choice. If you find that your story begins or could begin closer to the parts you find interesting then move the start point forward. It never hurts to play around with your setup and story arch, you'll likely find things you never knew about.
Several months sounds like a ton of time. Either cutting or time skipping will probably be necessary. Just because you're showing some 'status quo' aspects doesn't mean it has to be boring; real life can have a lot of conflict. That's the opportunity to establish themes and foreshadowing. The first act could include a dispute over a hover-car parking ticket. Maybe we'll learn the augmented police lean corrupt, or one in particular doesn't like the main character because he stole his girl. Nothing world shattering, but it does the job of forming roots along with the status quo.
A little late to the party but I hope it helps. Adapting to understanding story structure can be difficult at first but over time you will simply start to think in those terms and plotting gets to be much, much easier. It will help you to cut out the fat from your stories before you waste the time putting it in there in the first place. There are a lot of ways that you can go about this, but what I'd recommend is to look up some lists that tell you how to write a structured novel in X chapters. They will give you general guidelines on what kind of thing goes into each chapter and you fill in the details. Also keep in mind that if you don't care what's happening, your readers won't either. You need to introduce the reader to the character's world and how it is before everything goes wrong. Is it good? Is it bad? What problems does your MC face? It's only then that the call to action is going to have any impact on the reader, having seen the status quo first.
It seems the OP doesn't hang around here anymore or has abandoned this thread, but what the heck, I'll chime in anyway. It would be pretty hard to write a story without a first act. The first act is where you introduce your characters, their situations, and kick off the story itself (inciting incident). If you skip it people would get pretty annoyed reading about people they know nothing about and therefore don't care about. One of the main points of a first act is to make readers like or care about or at least understand the motivations of your main character, and possibly a couple of supporting ones as well. The three acts are basically— Introduction Main body of story Conclusion Hard to see how you could write a story without any of those parts—they're organic to writing, not artificial.
The first rule to the three act structure is to NOT USE THE THREE ACT STRUCTURE. It's a structure that was designed for movies, and while it can work for books, it doesn't have to work with books. With that out of the way, here's your more likely problem: You misunderstand the purpose of an exposition. The purpose of an exposition... er the character's back story, is not to be there just to be there. There are many reasons why authors do exposition but the most common reasons are two fold: first to establish what is at stake if the protagonist doesn't succeed and the second is to establish why this particular protagonist. For that reason, the exposition, or that first part of the story still has to be relevant to the rest of the story. For example, if I'm writing a story about a soldier about to go fight an alien invasion, I might just start at the moment he's brought in for a briefing. Why? Because that's where the story starts. Other things in his life, like a wife and child, can all be discussed in other areas of the novel. They don't have to be worked out right there and then.
Hi. I am new here... but I think that you don't need to write things straightforwardly. If you don't want to write about events (before the incident) in ACT 1, then don't do that. Write about them sometime later (if they are important). In my first story I used these 3 acts, but some events, that happened before the story starts, I wrote much later, because in the beginning they were not important. But later, they answered many questions. So write things how best you feel it, otherwise it could be boring from the start and no one will get to that good part.
