Of course, every part of your story is important, but if there’s one part where you really want to stick the landing, it’s the climax. As the conflict unfolds, the reader should learn more about the characters’ motives, the world of the story, the themes being explored, and you may want to foreshadow the climax as well.įinally, when you look back at the story’s rising action, it should be clear how each plot point connects to the story’s climax and aftermath. In rising action, the reader often gains access to key pieces of backstory. However, while this part of the book explores the story’s conflict and complications, the rising action should investigate much more than just the story’s plot. Often, things “get worse” in this part of the story: someone makes a wrong decision, the antagonist hurts the protagonist, new characters further complicate the plot, etc.įor many stories, rising action takes up the most amount of pages. The rising action explores the story’s conflict up until its climax. Write 1–3-page flash fiction in this online course with Barbara Henning, drawing on classic, poetic & experimental elements. Your exposition should end with the “inciting incident” – the event that starts the main conflict of the story.įlash Fiction: Writing the Short-Short Story Make your fictional world as real as this one. Still, whether your exposition is fifty pages or a sentence, use this part of the story to draw readers in. Lewis offers very little exposition in the Chronicles of Narnia series, choosing instead to entangle conflict with worldbuilding. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is wrought with backstory and exposition, often spanning chapters of pure worldbuilding. The length of your exposition depends on the complexity of the story’s conflict, the extent of the world being written, and the writer’s own personal preference. In the exposition, the writer’s sole focus is on building the world in which the story’s conflict happens. This part of the story primarily introduces the major fictional elements – the setting, characters, style, etc. Your story has to start somewhere, and in Freytag’s Pyramid, it starts with the exposition. If you’re looking to write your next story or polish one you just wrote, read more on Freytag’s Pyramid and what each element can do for your writing. Stages of a Story: Freytag’s Pyramid Diagram Here is the five-part structure of Freytag’s Pyramid in diagram form. It’s quite famous, so you may have heard it mentioned in an old English class, or maybe more recently in one of our online fiction writing courses.įreytag’s Pyramid describes the five key stages of a story, offering a conceptual framework for writing a story from start to finish. What is Freytag’s Pyramid? Novelist Gustav Freytag developed this narrative pyramid in the 19th century, as a description of a structure fiction writers had used for millennia. Whether you’re writing short stories, screenplays, nonfiction, or even some narrative poetry, the majority of stories follow a fairly simple pattern called Freytag’s Pyramid. Storytelling is one of the oldest human traditions, and although the art of creative writing traverses dozens of genres and thousands of languages, the actual storytelling formula hasn’t changed all that much.
Most stories follow a simple pattern called Freytag’s Pyramid. Understanding the five steps of Freytag’s Pyramid will give you a clearer sense of what makes a strong, compelling story.
What is Freytag’s Pyramid, and how can it help you write better stories? In simple terms, Freytag’s Pyramid is a five-part map of dramatic structure itself.