This miscommunication between Freytag and modern writer and teachers of story structure causes so many problems, and the biggest problem is a misunderstanding of what the falling action is. Modern Climax: highest moment of action in a story, usually the second or third to last scene In other words, the climax is a completely different thing.įreytag’s Climax: turning point in the middle of a story For Freytag, the climax is the turning point in a story, the reversal, when things that were going well for the main character start to go badly. Most people analyzing that story today, even the ones who say they're following Freytag’s Pyramid, would say that the climax occurs when Romeo commits suicide, mistakenly thinking Juliet is dead, and Juliet, waking up to him dying, commits suicide in response.īut that's because Freytag meant a different thing by climax than we do now. Freytag is essentially saying that one of the moments of lowest action in the whole story is actually the climax. If you're confused, that makes sense, because it's really confusing. Instead, it's when Romeo and Juliet part ways. Note that killing Tybalt is not the climax. To use Romeo and Juliet as an example, the climax, according to Freytag, occurs right after Romeo kills Tybalt in retaliation for Tybalt killing Mercutio. This is the plot diagram from the 1863 version of Freytag's Technique of the Drama, the first plot diagram in the world.īut it's also a bit strange, since the climax, according to Freytag, appears in the exact middle of the story. His plot diagram was influenced by this preference and follows a tragic story arc (specifically, the Icarus story arc).įreytag believed every story contains two halves, a play and a counterplay, with the climax in the middle. All the novels he wrote were tragedies, and nearly all of the stories he studied in Freytag's Technique are tragedies. He thought it was premier form of storytelling. However, if you look closer at Freytag's plot framework, you start to realize that he understood story structure radically different from how it’s taught today.įreytag was really interested in just one type of story: the tragedy. Freytag’s Pyramid has become the most commonly taught plot structure framework, finding its way into middle and high school classrooms as well as into the educations of thousands of writers. The term “falling action” was first popularized by a German novelist named Gustav Freytag. To answer that, you have to understand a bit of the history of story structure, especially the history of the climax in a plot. How did the falling action arrive there? And why do we not include it in our story structure framework? Many story structure frameworks, notably Freytag's Pyramid, place the falling action between the climax and denouement, like this: At The Write Practice, we define six elements of dramatic structure: Where Falling Action Fits in Dramatic Structure (or Doesn't)ĭramatic structure is an idea, originating in Aristotle’s Poetics, that effective stories can be broken down into elements. But first we need to review dramatic structure to see how falling action fits into dramatic structure. It is quite short, often just one scene, and in many stories it does not even exist.īefore we get into whether you, dear writer, should use falling action in your story, let’s talk about what the falling action is. In dramatic structure, it is one of the six elements of plot structure, occurring just before the resolution. The falling action in a story winds the story down from the climax to the resolution and the story’s end.

Is the story of icarus a tragedy