How do good stories end? In tragedy or triumph? With a wedding or a funeral?
That is the question of the denouement, a literary term that means more than just “the end.”
This article is all about denouement. In it, we will talk about the origin and definition of the literary term, give examples, and talk about where it fits in your writing.
How do you tell a great story? Perhaps the best way to judge a story is by how good the climax is.
If your story isn’t good, the climax will be muddled or boring. A good story, though, will bring together all the tension that has been building since the exposition into one perfect scene that overwhelms the audience and leaves them in awe.
What is the climax, though? And how do you write a good one?
So you wrote a story or a novel or a book. You’re proud. You’re excited. Visions of publishing dance in your head. Then you go back and read your story or novel or book, and you think, “Well, this is good and I feel proud of it. But it doesn’t match up to the stories/novels/books I know and love.”
You wrote a GOOD story, but not a GREAT one. Worse, you don’t know why. It might be that you’re missing a crisis.
If you’ve ever told a good story—one that has your friends or family on the floor laughing, or else on the edge of their seat asking, “What happened next?!”—then you know that you can’t get to the point of the story too quickly.
Instead, you draw out interest. You talk about all the things that went wrong. You make jokes and accentuate the best details. When you’re done, it’s not the punchline people remember; it’s everything leading up to it.
The same is true when you’re writing a story, particularly in novels, memoirs, and screenplays. It’s called the Rising Action, and it’s essential to get it right IF you want to write entertaining, informative, and deeply connecting stories.
In this article, I’m going to talk about the rising action: what it is, how it works in a story, how it’s been treated by scholars who study story structure throughout history, and finally how you can use it to write a great story.
Write from the point of view of an inanimate object.
