Many story-writing or story-analysis guidelines try to break a story into acts.

This metaphor imagines a story to be somewhat like a play, with certain logical breaks in the story dividing it up into 'scenes' and several of those scenes being lumped together into larger story segments called 'acts.' In a play, these logical breaks are moments for the stage hands to work at setting the physical configuration of the set in a more general story they may not be clear or nice at all, since metaphors do not usually perfectly describe reality. The word 'act' is sometimes used as part of a metaphor.

I feel like there's a lot of talking around the central point rather than addressing it: How is character and plot development generally spread out or concentrated among these acts? Is there a standard number of acts in each story, and can there be any variation in this number? What are the reasons for these standards? I have done some searching online for explanations about the composition of the acts of a story line, but I have not been able to find anything that fully describes how/why stories are divided into acts. In this episode, one of the characters mentions the transition into another act of the story line. One of the more recent references that I've come across is one contained in an episode of Comedy Bang Bang. These references normally came from stories that had particularly meta themes, or TV shows that broke the 4th wall. Over the years, I have heard many references to the structure of different stories across many different types of media. While I was reading through these plays, I thought that it was simply a way that plays, specifically were compiled. When in high school, I was exposed to Shakespeare plays where the stories were divided into different acts. I'm interested in the elements of how a good story is compiled.

True story about the act