Welcome back to Flash Week! Today is Day 5. If you’ve gotten this far, you have a four-act outline ready, you’ve drafted Act One, and you are ready to write Act Two of this story. If you missed the first four days, I recommend you go back and start from Day 1. We’ll be here when you get back.

For this month’s flash story, we’re going to use a classic four-act structure, and today is all about getting the story to the midpoint. It’s a tall order for ~200-300 words!

Here’s today’s exercise:

Using your four-act outline, write the rising action (Act Two) of your story. Don’t forget to:

• Show a struggle to obtain a character want
• Resolve the struggle — the character should clearly succeed or fail
• Keep a goal out of reach — either the struggle fails, or it succeeds but now there’s a new goal

Got it? Great! Save it for tomorrow, when we’ll work on Act Three. See you then!