Freytag's Pyramid
Nov. 4th, 2004 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
odd_buttonsThe following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Freytag's Pyramid
This classic description of rising and falling action that characterizes most successful fiction, particularly longer works, was formulated by a nineteenth-century German novelist, playwright, and critic.
Gustav Freytag identified key elements. First, readers feel thy must know who is in the story and where and when it is taking place (exposition); the plot has to get going early (rising action); once readers understand the situation, something else has to happen to keep things going (complication); and all this leads to something (climax) where things change (reversal), and as things wind down (falling action) the end is reached (catastrophe).
Although Freytag was focusing on drama, if you're writing a novel, you should consider the strength of this structure. One way or another, crudely or subtly, it underlies most fiction. You can modify it by changing the order, fragmenting pieces, eliminating others, and otherwise warping, exploding, imploding, or ingeniously stressing a single element. Faulkner's exposition in The Sound and the Fury is through Benjy, a character who has no adult understanding of what he says. The rising action and climax in Nabokov's Pale Fire occur in footnotes. But these writers understand that you can't hold up a bridge with a smile -- distorting, inverting or undoing traditional structure meant that they had to discover other ways to keep immediacy, tension, and momentum.
See Novel, Plot, Position, Suspense, Tension.
Freytag's Pyramid
This classic description of rising and falling action that characterizes most successful fiction, particularly longer works, was formulated by a nineteenth-century German novelist, playwright, and critic.
Gustav Freytag identified key elements. First, readers feel thy must know who is in the story and where and when it is taking place (exposition); the plot has to get going early (rising action); once readers understand the situation, something else has to happen to keep things going (complication); and all this leads to something (climax) where things change (reversal), and as things wind down (falling action) the end is reached (catastrophe).
Although Freytag was focusing on drama, if you're writing a novel, you should consider the strength of this structure. One way or another, crudely or subtly, it underlies most fiction. You can modify it by changing the order, fragmenting pieces, eliminating others, and otherwise warping, exploding, imploding, or ingeniously stressing a single element. Faulkner's exposition in The Sound and the Fury is through Benjy, a character who has no adult understanding of what he says. The rising action and climax in Nabokov's Pale Fire occur in footnotes. But these writers understand that you can't hold up a bridge with a smile -- distorting, inverting or undoing traditional structure meant that they had to discover other ways to keep immediacy, tension, and momentum.
See Novel, Plot, Position, Suspense, Tension.