However, not every scene in the rising action relates directly to the main conflict. In the rising action, events occur to raise the stakes and complicate the characters’ attempts to fulfill their objectives. Rising action: This is almost always the longest part of the plot. For example, this could be the moment that the protagonist and antagonist realize they can’t both achieve their goals.ģ. Inciting incident: An event occurs that makes the conflict inevitable. The audience is given the information they’ll need to understand the conflict.Ģ. Exposition: The setting and characters are introduced. The plot beats along Freytag’s Pyramid are:ġ. If you’ve been through a fifth-grade English language arts (ELA) class in the age of Common Core standards, you’ve seen this already.
EXPOSITION PLOT DIAGRAM SERIES
Freytag modeled plots as a series of steps held together by a line that rises, hits a peak, and then falls. Those terms come from the best-known plot structure and the one we’ll start working with today: Freytag’s Pyramid.įreytag’s Pyramid was developed by Gustav Freytag, a German playwright. There are many kinds of plot diagrams, but they all share a few traits: As your story nears a climax, the action should rise and rise, only falling at the very end. You can consider the plot diagram to be a graph with time as the x-axis and action as the y-axis.
It doesn’t necessarily refer to fight scenes or car chases but to your plot’s degree of complication and tension.
That makes them easy to diagram - and if you can’t diagram your plot, it needs some work. But unless your work is extremely experimental (which puts it outside the scope of this article), plots have to flow in a continuous line. They’re often based on feelings and images as much as concrete ideas. The story outlines the situation and proposes a sequence of events the plot is concerned with cause and effect. Forster famously said that “The King died, then the Queen died,” is a story, but “The King died, then the Queen died of grief” is a plot.