Aristotle gave Hollywood the three act structure. You know: a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back (and puts on a show!). Wants, acts, gets.

Sure, it works.
Yawn.

How many of you will admit how boring and predictable this has become?

Do you pay ten bucks for a movie, and then realize you know exactly what’s going to happen in the next scene­every scene?

Do you read a book review or thumb through a novel and say to yourself, “haven’t I read this story before?”

And especially regarding queer fiction, can you tell the story backwards and forwards of the young outsider coming of age, yearning to belong but determined to live life on his or her own terms?

(I read a witty column about this recently, “The cookie cutter novel,” written in July 2006 by Charlie Anders, a San Francisco blogger. You can find it here, on Other magazine’s web site: http://othermag.org/blog/?p=54 .)

As a reader and a writer with broader concerns, I wanted something deeper for Tabou. Something more like music, something that would resonate long after the performance is over. I was not interested in recording a “slice of life.” That is achieved a hundred times every year: check your local bookstore. I was not interested in rendering characters that “people can identify with,” as if that is the limit of good writing.

I was interested, as one of my early readers pointed out, in creating a new world, “Rewriting a new history the way we need to make it, going forward.” I was interested in a new mythology. A saga in the best sense, the Scandinavian sense, of the word (hold the cheese, please). An epic tale.

The five act structure is a much better fit for a story told over four generations, with one lead character on a mission, whose fate turns on the choices and actions of four other women.

You know the five act structure by heart if you’ve ever seen “The Wizard of Oz.” There’s the exposition (Act 1). (Dorothy leads us to meet the cast of characters on the farm in Kansas, where Toto may be euthanized “shudder” by Mrs. Gulch.) After setting the scene and proving all the background we need to understand the themes, we watch the rising action in Act 2 (Dorothy?s Odyssey, her journey back home through the land of Oz) until it reaches a turning point in Act 3 (where Dorothy and her friends must defend against the Wicked Witch). In the falling action, plans unravel and assumptions are tested when the disillusioned hero (Dorothy and her friends) has to stay on track, even though prospects are bleak. In Act 5, the weary hero often receives help in the eleventh hour (like Dorothy being helped by Glinda the Good Witch) to resolve conflicts and pave the way for a happy or tragic ending, depending on what kind of story it is.

Each of the Tabou books has its own five act structure, where the climax occurs on one big night, which becomes a turning point in Jocelyn’s Odyssey.

So when thinking about Tabou in terms of its five book architecture, remember the five act dramatic structure in use for centuries since Homer and made famous by a guy who never made it big in Hollywood, Gustav Freytag: