- Level:
- Beginner
- Lessons:
- 14 Lessons
Act 7: Try, Try Again
After their plan falls apart spectacularly, your characters try again with a few tweaks. But is that really enough?
- Reading Time
- approx. 4 min
In Act 7, your protagonist is about to learn that sometimes, a little tweak to a plan just isn’t enough.
What is Act 7?
Act 7 represents a critical stage in story development where your protagonist attempts to recover from their devastating failure in Act 6. Despite the hard lessons they should have learned, they’re not quite ready to embrace real change. Instead, they believe a few minor adjustments to their previous approach will be enough to succeed.
After a huge fight with her best friend, Emma tries to fix things by planning the perfect birthday party, addressing all the surface-level problems they fought about. She’s more thoughtful now—remembering her friend’s favorite cake and activities—but she’s still missing that the real issue isn’t about parties or presents, but about not being there emotionally when her friend needed her most.
Why is Act 7 Important?
This act serves multiple crucial purposes in your story. First, it demonstrates the protagonist’s growth—they’re not making exactly the same mistakes as in Act 3, showing some development. Second, it illustrates how difficult real change can be, even after major setbacks. Finally, it sets up the eventual transformation that will come later by proving conclusively that small adjustments aren’t enough: the protagonist needs a complete paradigm shift.
After missing another important family event, a parent tries to make it up to their child by planning an elaborate weekend of activities. They’re more organized than before, taking time off work and preparing everything in advance, but they’re still trying to solve their relationship problems with elaborate demonstrations rather than understanding their child’s need for regular, simple moments together.
How to Write Act 7
Act 7 unfolds in three phases.
- Beginning: At the start of Act 7, show your protagonist and their allies picking themselves up after their Act 6 failure. They’re bruised but not broken, and they think they’ve figured out what went wrong. Have them identify surface-level problems while missing the deeper thematic issues. For example, if your theme involves learning to trust others, they might decide their previous plan failed because they didn’t have enough backup plans, rather than recognizing their fundamental inability to rely on others.
- Middle: In the midpoint, let their modified plan start to unravel. The failure should be different from Act 6 but stem from the same root cause: Their resistance to the theme. The key here is to make the reasons for failure obvious to readers while your protagonist remains blind to them. This creates dramatic tension as readers watch your character stumble toward another setback. Unlike Act 3’s denial or Act 6’s complete disaster, this failure should feel more focused and specific, highlighting exactly how the protagonist’s resistance to the theme undermines their efforts.
- End: As Act 7 closes, your protagonist and their allies should be in an even worse position than after Act 6. While the failure might not be as spectacular, its impact should be more profound because it proves that even their “improved” approach doesn’t work. Meanwhile, show your antagonist gaining ground. This growing gap between protagonist and antagonist creates urgency and raises the stakes. The act should end with your protagonist feeling a bit lost—they’ve tried their best ideas twice, now, and nothing seems to work.
By crafting a strong Act 7, you create a crucial bridge between your protagonist’s old way of thinking and their eventual transformation. This act’s careful balance of partial growth and continued failure helps readers understand why the protagonist must ultimately embrace the theme to succeed.
Thematic Failure
A common mistake in writing Act 7 is making the failure feel like a repeat of Act 6. Instead, this failure should be more personal and focused, specifically highlighting the thematic blind spot in your protagonist’s approach. Another pitfall is moving too quickly to the protagonist’s eventual transformation.
Remember that the goal isn’t just to make your protagonist fail again, it’s to demonstrate why their current approach can never work, no matter how they tweak it. Act 7 represents that moment where they’ve grown enough to try something different but not enough to try something truly transformative (they’ll get to that in a later act). This tension drives your story forward while deepening your thematic exploration.
Wrapping Up Act 7
When writing this act, ask yourself these questions:
- How has your protagonist grown since Act 3?
- What surface-level lessons did they learn from Act 6?
- How can you show that these changes aren’t enough?
- What aspects of the theme are they still resisting?
- How will this failure differ from previous ones while stemming from the same root cause?
The key to a successful Act 7 is showing how your protagonist has changed while highlighting how they still need to change more. Their growth should be real but insufficient, their failure different from but thematically connected to previous setbacks. This creates the perfect setup for the transformative moments that will follow in later acts.
By following these guidelines, you can create an Act 7 that serves its role in your story’s structure, demonstrating the need for fundamental change while maintaining tension and character development. This act helps readers understand why the protagonist must ultimately embrace the theme, making their eventual transformation more powerful and convincing.
Following a disastrous school performance where everything went wrong, the drama teacher creates a new, extremely detailed plan for the next show. She implements better rehearsal schedules and backup plans for every prop, but she’s still focusing on perfect execution rather than helping her students find their confidence and joy in performing.
This lesson was taught by:
Corey Ostman
After spending three decades writing science fiction for machines, he now writes science fiction for humans. His brain is almost entirely in the future, so if you encounter him, you’re likely experiencing a form of temporal rift.