I was having lunch with some friends a while ago, and they asked me how the new book was going. It’s always a tricky question to answer, and depending on the day or the hour, I might smile and say, “Pretty good,” or fall on the floor sobbing.

On this particular day, though, I said something like, “I’ve just finished rewriting the first act.” They looked startled. “Is it a play?” they said. “We thought it was a book.” 

So I explained about the three- (or four-) act structure.

When I was in my early 40s, I wrote a few plays for Terrapin Puppet Theatre in Hobart. Several were for kids, one was for adults. My first play for Terrapin was Heroes, and when I started to write it I knew nothing about the craft of writing. 

The biggest part of nothing that I didn’t know about was structure. I had a vague idea that such a thing existed, but that was it. It was a mystery and I didn’t even know where to start looking for it.

Then a friend recommended a book called Making a Good Script Great, by Linda Seger, which talked about the three-act structure. Seger’s book was written for film scripts, but the ideas worked fine for puppetry, and when I started writing novels, I discovered (as many writers had done before me), that they worked there too.

You see, the three-act structure is really about good timing – how to shape a novel (or a play or a film) to keep the reader (or viewer) interested. It’s about high points and low points, and how you need something to happen at the beginning (to get the story started), and some nice big turning points in the middle (to send it in unexpected directions), and something even bigger at the end (for the climax). It’s been a part of story-telling for hundreds of years, from Greek tragedy to TV movie-of-the-week.

Fifty years ago, this structure was really obvious in stage plays, because the curtain would come down at the end of an act, and everyone in the audience would go out and get a beer. Stage plays don’t work like that any more, but the three-act structure is still there, tucked away inside what you see.

And it’s there in novels too. Or at least, in a lot of novels. And definitely in mine.

This is one of the things I love most about writing – that it’s a mixture of art and craft. You need both, and you can keep learning the craft side for the rest of your life, and never get bored.

. . .

The boy was losing patience. He was only six and couldn't understand why I wasn’t answering his persistent questions. Finally he shrugged, turned to my companions and said in Spanish, “She is an imbecile, yes?” 

“No!” they cried, horrified. But after seven days in Spain I agreed with the boy. I was 35 years old and I’d lost my language – and with it had gone all claim to being an intelligent woman. I felt like the village idiot. If someone was kind to me, I almost kissed their hand in gratitude. 

A week earlier I'd been traveling around France, building on my high school French, writing down every new word I heard. I couldn't discuss philosophy, but I was getting by. Then I caught the train to Madrid, and the change of language sent me reeling. I took out my notebook – and put it away again, defeated before I began. 

In Madrid I stayed in the Calle del Pozo with a woman I’d met in Amsterdam. With her dodgy English and my nonexistent Spanish, it was a struggle to communicate, and before long the language barrier overwhelmed me and I stopped even trying to speak. 

But one night at 3am, in the Cafe del Mayo 68, I found an unlikely saviour. A small dark man with a scar that almost closed his right eye approached our table and introduced himself through gestures. He’d been deaf all his life and couldn't talk, but he was the most immediately understandable person I'd met since I left England. With dance, drawing and mime he told us about his birth in Beirut, the death of his mother and father, his journey to Spain with his brother who sold hashish. His performance cut across all barriers, and my companions and I each came away convinced that he’d been speaking our language.

Over the next few days I began to experiment with signs. Soon I grew bolder, waving my arms, grimacing and smirking. It wasn't quite a voice, but it was close. I started to feel human again.

As I left Madrid and mimed my way through northern Spain, I took top-up lessons. In Leon a woman stopped me in the street, sweeping her hand downwards from her groin, at the same time making a hissing sound. Laughing, I directed her towards the public toilet. In Oviedo a grand old man in a black hat asked me where I was from. When I said Australia he clasped his hands together and said, “Australia, Espagne – equale.”

On my last night in Spain I stayed at a hostel in Fuenterrabia. After dinner, a young Spanish bloke started talking to me and I found that I'd picked up more of the language than I'd realised – enough to understand that this man claimed to have discovered the frontiers between past, present and future. Once we were past that bit, I was lost, though I think it was something to do with the secret police, the roar of Hitler's crowds, and amazing sexual prowess. 

For the first time in weeks I realised that not knowing what people were saying can sometimes be an advantage.

Before Lian Tanner settled down in southern Tasmania to write internationally acclaimed fantasy novels, she did lots of stuff such as being dynamited while scuba diving and arrested while busking. She once spent a week in the jungles of Papua New Guinea hunting for a Japanese soldier left over from the Second World War. Learn more about her at liantanner.com.au.