Stages of the plot : Introduction, exposition and rising action

Storytelling is one of the oldest human traditions. Although the art of creative writing traverses dozens of genres and thousands of languages, the actual storytelling formula hasn’t changed all that much. Whether you’re writing short stories, screenplays, nonfiction, or even some narrative poetry, most accounts follow a relatively simple pattern called Freytag’s Pyramid.

Introduction to Freytag’s Pyramid

What is Freytag’s Pyramid? Novelist Gustav Freytag developed this narrative pyramid in the 19th century, describing a structure fiction writers had used for millennia. It’s pretty 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.

Freytag’s Pyramid describes the five critical stages of a story, offering a conceptual framework for writing a story from start to finish. These stages are:

Exposition

Rising Action

Climax

Falling Action

Resolution

 Freytag’s Pyramid: Exposition

Your story has to start somewhere, and Freytag’s Pyramid begins with the exposition. This part of the story primarily introduces the major fictional elements – the setting, characters, style, etc. In the show, the writer’s sole focus is building the world in which the story’s conflict happens.

The length of your exposition depends on the complexity of the story’s conflict, the extent to which the world is written, and the writer’s own personal preference. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is wrought with backstory and exposition, often spanning chapters of pure worldbuilding. By contrast, C. S. Lewis offers minimal exposition in the Chronicles of Narnia series, choosing instead to entangle conflict with worldbuilding. Still, use this part of the story to draw readers in whethe,r your exposition is fifty pages or a sentence. Make your fictional world as accurate as this one.

Your exposition should end with the “inciting incident” – the event that starts the story's central conflict.

Freytag’s Pyramid: Rising Action

The rising action explores the story’s conflict up until its climax. 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.

For many stories, rising action takes up most of the pages. 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. In the rising action, the reader often gains access to critical pieces of backstory. As the conflict unfolds, the reader should learn more about the characters’ motives, the world of the story, and the themes being explored, and you may also want to foreshadow the climax. 

Finally, when you look back at the story’s rising action, it should be clear how each plot point connects to its climax and aftermath. But first, let’s write the conclusion.