Thursday, February 21, 2013

Rising and Falling Action

I thought I would do a short post today, with illustration. I think everyone knows that stories have three acts. Act one is the introduction of the story, act two is the exposition of the story, and act three is the resolution of the story. But in there between and around all those acts are rising and falling activities.

What does that look like exactly?



Something like that. But really, in my opinion, there would be more mountains before the climax. I mean, a story is not all rising action from the beginning of the story to the climax. Although there are a select number of writers (ahem, film makers) who believe it is. They write all action from beginning to middle, and then slowly let it fall from climax to end. Not necessarily a bad thing, unless it is breathless action, then the reader will be utterly exhausted by the end.

What do you think Murderers?

3 comments:

Sonya said...

I agree, Kim! There should be a lot more spikes and drops in there -- a plot graph should look like an EKG that keeps spiking higher until it drops off at the end and you've killed your reader because it's flatlined at the bottom...

Okay, maybe that last part wasn't such a great analogy. :-) But yeah, I think it should be spikier!

Aaron Paul Lazar said...

Amen to that! Thanks, Kim!

Kim Smith said...

Thx yall