Q&A Excerpt: Maggie Stiefvater

Maggie Stiefvater was a 2026 guest lecturer for the Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop. Maggie is the New York Times bestselling author of The Listeners, The Raven Cycle, The Scorpio Races, and many others; her books have sold over five million copies around the world. She plays several musical instruments (most infamously, the bagpipes), and makes art in multiple media (usually colored pencils). She lives in Virginia with her husband, her children, many dogs, and a growly tuner car.

In this excerpt transcribed from a question-and-answer session, Maggie talks about four-act structure.

QUESTION: I’m here in part because I’d never heard of a four-act sequence. I had heard of the three-act sequence, which I’d been told is often best for short stories, and then the five-act one … Why is four-act structure better, especially for a novel, for you than the five-act structure? What’s the difference between them that you find most helpful?

ANSWER: So the biggest difference for me is that I find that five-act structure gets too close to that writing system method, where it describes accurately a specific book, and what if that’s not the book I wanted to write? Maybe the book wants to be a different shape. 

I think that you could probably take that five-act structure—and I’ve looked at it—and probably lay it over some of my books, and it would fit, but there are several others that it wouldn’t. So the reason why I like that four-act structure is: I want to love the three-act structure, but I get lost in that second act every time, and the only thing that really changes with four-act is that you’re just defining what the second half of that second act looks like.

And I do that, eyes wide open, knowing that this is still a system, more than three-act structure, because it is a story-forward and genre-based kind of structure that fits—I would say 95% of all of the genre books that I would take off the shelf and look at would fit into this, as opposed to being able to say, well‚ it’s sort of funky for this one. So that’s why it wins for me. It’s enough information that I don’t get totally lost, but it pulls back from that idea of it being a system.

QUESTION: I would love to hear you talk a little bit about the end of Act 3 and beginning of Act 4 … the transition of that moment.

ANSWER: So I think what makes the darkest moment [in Act 3] so difficult to get right—and I am gonna say right up front, I have never drafted an end of an Act 3 correctly, ever, in first draft, ever—I would say that second to Act 1, it is the part of the book which most accurately reflects the promises of the book, which means you have to know everything as a writer to actually get it right. Because what you’re doing is‚ you’re culminating those internal and external journeys in a really brutal moment that’s just, “What is the most intense form of that that this book, according to its genre, is going to offer you?” And the odds that you will actually know that information by the time you draft it—it’s just impossible, which means it’s always disastrous. 

But that said, what does that shape look like? It’s going to be when the A plot is barreling towards that moment where you think that you know how it’s going to end, and then we get derailed. … I’m going to go back to that sentence of when that external and that internal collide. The character had been made to do something at the end of Act 1, behave in a way that they would have never behaved before, and now they have been changed both externally and internally. The situation that they are going through and how they feel about it is dynamic because of all that’s happened. And when we get to that most intense moment, it’s because that old internal version of themselves is now confronting that new external reality, and they have to move forward as a synthesis of everything they’ve done. So we need to see both what is so intense that it can make them shift one final last time—a huge change for their behavior, and for the way that we tell the story. And we absolutely need to see them understand in that moment that it is changing forever. Do I think they need to know? I think usually they need to know, but I’m gonna actually pull back on that and say the reader is the one who absolutely has to know. We have to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this has changed forever. 

And I’m gonna go one step beyond and say that one of the things that I often see is that people save their final big character push for the fourth act, and I don’t think that’s usually successful. I think tying that up with the end of Act 3, and making sure that Act 4 is very much about external machinations and demonstrating how they have been changed, feels more satisfying because we want to live with that moment of change and understand that it’s gonna stick and see what that looks like. And so that’s what gives it that climax and satisfaction.

If you haven’t done that, that’s when you feel the need to go and tack an epilogue onto it, because you didn’t get a chance to actually demonstrate it. And an example of that would be if you have—this is very simplified—a cowardly character who has run from things for their entire life, and then finally, at the end of the third act, they are pushed into a moment where they realize that they have to make a decision which is very selfless and very brave, and they do it. And they realize that it was old habits that were making them cowardly, that they weren’t actually in any danger of running away at all, and they’re never going to be the person that they were before. It’s more satisfying to see them demonstrate that bravery against all of the things that they confront in Act 4 than it is to see continuously pushing them into braver and braver moments. We want to see proof in Act 4, because Act 4 is about keeping promises.

NOTE: This transcript has been edited for clarity.