by Writing Workshops Staff
A day ago
There is a peculiar prejudice in short fiction circles against three-act structure. It belongs, the thinking goes, to screenplays and feature films. The short story, by contrast, is for character studies, mood pieces, lyric experiments. For many writers, that is where the conversation about structure ends. Andreas Trolf would like to complicate that assumption.
In Using and Abusing the Three-Act Structure in Short Fiction, an 8-week online workshop beginning September 16, 2026, the Emmy-nominated TV writer (Nickelodeon's Sanjay and Craig, Adult Swim's Tigtone) and fiction author whose work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Joyland, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency turns the structural vocabulary of screenwriting on its head and applies it to the literary short story.
Students read screenplays alongside contemporary fiction by George Saunders, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Ann Beattie, then submit their own stories for full-class workshop and revision.
By the end, you will have a working three-act vocabulary you can use or refuse, a story workshopped and revised under that structural lens, and a clearer sense of how readers actually process the information you give them.
At WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, Trolf brings the rare combination of professional dramatic craft and literary sensibility to a workshop where the goal is not to follow rules but to know exactly when, and why, you are choosing to break them.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Andreas:
Writing Workshops: Hi, Andreas. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Andreas Trolf: My name is Andreas. I'm a television and fiction writer. I like bluegrass guitar, old British motorcycles, noodle dishes, cats, skateboarding, and riding my bicycle. Sometimes I think I might be enthusiastic about too many things. Before I was a writer, I worked as a fine art archivist and painted houses.
Writing Workshops: What's the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?
Andreas Trolf: I honestly wish that I'd learned more about three-act structure early in my writing life. This is something that's taught early on in screenwriting classes but doesn't seem to get mentioned much, particularly in classes about the short story. The caveat here— and essentially the caveat of this entire class—is that this kind of structure isn't strictly speaking "necessary" in short fiction. A short story can be a character study, a mood piece, a scene, whatever—it's generally much harder to pin down than a novel. But understanding structure, and knowing when to use it, is something I find crucial to understanding your own work and to understanding a reader's expectations. Three-act structure exists because it is a remarkably effective way for us to process information, and to ignore it is something I believe short story writers do at their own peril.
"Three-act structure exists because it is a remarkably effective way for us to process information, and to ignore it is something I believe short story writers do at their own peril."
Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn't have before, what is it?
Andreas Trolf: I hope students will walk away from this class with a stronger understanding of, and empathy for, their readers—how readers take in and process information, how a writer works with a reader's expectations. A specific shift in writing that might come along with this is being more fully aware of what is at stake in the story, both for readers and characters.
Writing Workshops: What's the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.
Andreas Trolf: The opening sentence of Halle Butler's hilarious Banal Nightmare:
Margaret Anne "Moddie" Yance had just returned to her native land in the Midwestern town of X, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist.
Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?
Andreas Trolf: As an undergrad, I was in a workshop led by a very talented author and empathetic teacher, who stressed to us both brevity and pacing, which I believe are two things that absolutely overlap with any discussion of structure. He used a visual metaphor for cutting scenes to the bone, which was that if a scene consists of a boulder rolling down a hill, rather than beginning the scene by describing the vast geological processes that brought the boulder to rest on the hill, it's almost always better to begin the scene the very moment when, after millions of years, a small bird lands on the boulder and tips it, finally, over the edge and sets it into motion. A scene's potential energy being converted to kinetic.
Writing Workshops: What's a craft move you're slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, a small, specific technique.
Andreas Trolf: This may be very idiosyncratic, but I absolutely love it when a writer who uses otherwise perfect grammar messes with sentence structure or even just puts a single word where it doesn't belong—something that would attract an editor's red pen but which is done 100% intentionally. Sentence-level prose, like structure, is a place where knowing when to subvert the rules can have a tremendous effect.
Build a structural vocabulary you can use or subvert with intent. Spend 8 weeks workshopping a short story under Andreas Trolf this fall.
Enroll in the Three-Act Structure Workshop →Writing Workshops: What's a book you press into people's hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?
Andreas Trolf: Most recently that book has been Open Throat by Henry Hoke. It's a beautiful and lyrical story about a mountain lion living in LA's Griffith Park. It thoroughly upended any understanding I had of what a novel is, or should be. Calling it a novel seems both insane and absolutely perfect.
Writing Workshops: What's the worst writing advice that sounds smart?
Andreas Trolf: Anyone who claims that there are inviolable rules to writing is someone I would urge people to ignore. Contrary to anything I've written here (or will tell you in class), the only *inviolable* rule I know of is that if you can get away with it, go for it.
"It's almost always better to begin the scene the very moment when, after millions of years, a small bird lands on the boulder and tips it, finally, over the edge and sets it into motion. A scene's potential energy being converted to kinetic."
Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: "Most writing classes won't tell you this, but..."
Andreas Trolf: This feels like a continuation of the previous question, so I'm going to answer it like that. Most writing classes won't tell you this, but no one really knows what they're doing. Even the acknowledged "masters" have heated disagreements about what makes for "good" writing. An air quotes bad story has often been saved by pure style, and air quotes great stories can just as often feel clinical and unalive.
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Andreas Trolf: Maybe this means that I should be teaching a class on sentence-level prose instead, but I think there's nothing quite like a perfect sentence to make a reader sit up and take notice. Not necessarily something baroque, not flashy, just perfect. Which is, of course, wildly subjective. This, coupled with a sense of playfulness—the idea that both the reader and the writer are taking some measure of joy from this whole endeavor—is certainly what did it for me. I'm pretty sure it was John Barth or Italo Calvino who first produced this effect.
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?
Andreas Trolf: I don't think that workshop feedback should be about judgment so much as it should be a conversation. The most important thing to me is never to step on anyone's enthusiasm for their ideas. To that end, I prefer to ask questions about the work rather than make statements about it.
Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?
Andreas Trolf: I have been attempting to sing "Modern Major General" from The Pirates of Penzance in its entirety from memory for probably 12 years now and I have yet to succeed.
Trolf's workshop is not built on judgment. It is built on the kind of structural conversation that helps you understand your own choices, deepen them, and revise with intention. Whether you want to master three-act structure to use it, or to deliberately ignore it, you will leave this class with the vocabulary to do either with full awareness of what you are choosing. Workshop seats are limited to ten writers. Class begins September 16, 2026, and meets weekly via Zoom on Wednesdays from 6:00 to 8:00 PM ET.
Workshop one short story, revise it under a structural lens, and walk away with a craft framework you can return to long after class ends.
Save Your Seat in the Three-Act Workshop →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
