How the ascending motion works in a narrative: definition and examples of this dramatic structural ingredient
If you've ever told a good story – one in which your friends or family laugh on the floor or ask on the edge of their seat: "What happened next ?!" – then you know that you can't get to it Point of the story too quickly.
Instead, you get interest. You talk about all the things that went wrong. They are joking and emphasize the best details. When you're done, it's not the punch line that people remember. it is all that leads to it.
The same applies if you write a story, especially in novels, memoirs and screenplays. It's called "Rising Action" and it is important to do it right if you want to write entertaining, informative and deeply connected stories.
In this article, I'm going to talk about the ascending action: what it is, how it works in a story, how it is treated by scientists studying the structure of stories throughout history, and finally how you use it to write a great story can story.
Let's jump in
Dramatic structure
Before we talk about the ascending plot and its use in your writing, let's talk about the dramatic structure or narrative structure in general.
Dramatic structure is an idea that comes from Aristotle's poetics and says that effective stories can be broken down into elements. In writing practice, we define six elements of a dramatic structure:
- exposition
- Inciting incident
- Increasing measures / progressive complications
- crisis
- Climax
- resolution
When authors construct a story, they should contain these six elements.
Rising action is one of the most important parts of the dramatic structure, as it contains most of the action in a story.
What is the ascending action?
Rising definition of action
The ascending plot in a story climaxes the plot through a series of increasingly complicated events and decisions of the main character or characters, leading to a final decision of great importance.
In a dramatic structure, it is one of the five main parts that appear after the exhibition and are nearing their climax. Some methods of structuring stories call it the ascending movement or the progressing complications.
As the source of the main conflict, it contains most of the plot in a story and is usually the longest piece.
How the ascending action in a story works
The purpose of the ascending action is to lead the character to a difficult decision.
However, most people, including most characters, are reluctant to make decisions, especially difficult decisions.
This is what the ascending action is designed to do to get the characters to a point where they are forced to make a decision.
The way this happens is to subject characters to a series of increasingly complicated events and decisions.
In fact, Story Grid, a dramatic framework formulated by Shawn Coyne, calls the ascending action "progressive complications". Things become more and more complicated for the protagonist until they reach a turning point and are forced to make a decision. This point of decision making is a character crisis.
And this crisis is always a choice between two conflicting values, whether security or sacrifice, love or duty, performance or justice.
The rising action builds the conflict between two values
This is where the drama comes from: the conflict between these two values and the final choice of the protagonist.
You heard that stories need conflict. This conflict is the engine of the action. However, effective stories are not driven by conflict for the sake of the conflict, but by conflict for the sake of choice.
In other words, it is the character's choices that drive effective stories, not just the events that the character experiences.
How does it work in practice?
We'll look at various examples in a moment. But first I need to briefly look at the different ways people talk about the ascending action.
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Stories do not consist of events, but of decisions that characters make. The purpose of the ascending action is to guide your character to the point where he has to make a difficult decision.
Freytags Rising Action vs. modern 3-act story structure
The Freytag pyramid is one of the most common frames for structuring stories. This concept, which was formulated by Gustav Freytag in 1863, has shaped the way people think about the structure of stories today.
Nevertheless, Freytag's own understanding of the plot and structure is very different from how most authors now think and talk about it.
Today's authors contain the same elements as Freytag. However, we will place them in different places, as you will see in the figure below.
While this illustration is not perfectly to scale, the ascending action that Freytag calls the ascending movement is significantly shorter than if you included everything in a modern three-act story structure model after the exhibition and to the climax.
Despite their differences, these models can overlap, and you can use both to better rethink the structure of your story. I mainly mention this to clarify the language I use in the following examples.
Examples of increasing actions
Now let's look at examples of the ascending action, the ascending movement, or the progressing complications in action.
Let's start with the analysis with the selection on which each story focuses. As I said above, the purpose of the ascending action is to force a character to choose because decisions are the source of the drama.
So we will work backwards from this decision and show how the ascending action forces this character into this decision.
Rising action in Romeo and Juliet
How does the increasing action in Romeo and Juliet work, starting with the crisis?
The climatic choice / crisis: End your life OR stay alive in one world without the other.
Out of context, these two decisions are crazy. Why should a young, newly married couple decide to split up? More extreme, why should two young people with so much potential from good families choose to end their lives?
These decisions are the core of the story, the climatic moments. They are also decisions that nobody would make without a good reason.
The rising action provides the reason. If we start from this choice and work backwards, we can see how the increasing action affects this crisis.
The events in the ascending action are:
- Romeo believes Juliet is dead.
- Juliet fakes her own death, but the message Romeo tells of her plan is never delivered.
- Juliet is forced to become engaged to another man (even though she is already married to Romeo).
- Romeo is exiled and he and Juliet tearfully separate.
- Romeo kills Tybalt, Julia's cousin, after Tybalt kills Mercutio, Romeo's best friend. *
- Romeo and Juliet secretly flee.
- Romeo and Juliet meet at a party and fall in love, even though their families are enemies.
- Exposition: Two rival families fight in the streets of Verona.
* Here Freytag marks the end of the ascending movement, the climax being Romeo and Juliet, who part with tears. Most modern three-story story structures would mark this scene as part of the increasing action / progressive complications.
From this perspective, the choice makes perfect sense, and the stakes are well positioned, making this choice difficult enough.
Climatic decisions have to be difficult. If not, the author has not done his job properly.
Also note that the ascending action covers a lot of ground, much of the story. Even if you end the ascending action in which Freytag is playing – and few writers would do that today – it still covers almost half of the piece.
Let's look at another example, from Ready Player One:
Rising action in Ready Player One
What is the crisis, the climatic decision, the Wade Watts, A.K.A. Parzival, must do one in Ready Player?
First, a brief summary if you are not familiar with the story. In a dystopian future, Wade Watts spends most of his time in a virtual reality world called OASIS. Halliday, the rich and famous creator of OASIS, has died and has hidden a sophisticated puzzle in this virtual world to determine who will inherit his assets and control over OASIS. Wade stumbles across the first clue and then goes up against thousands of other hopeful puzzle solvers to win the game.
The climatic choice / crisis: Go alone or share the winnings from the game with your friends.
Ready Player One's profits include billions of dollars and full administrative control over OASIS. It's everything Wade Watts ever wanted. Why on earth should he be tempted to share that at all?
The ascending action gives us the answer. As with Romeo and Juliet, if we start from this choice and work backwards, we can see how the increasing action affects this crisis.
The events in Ready Player One's ascending action include most of the events in history, from (spoiler alert!) From the moment he shares information about how to defeat Joust and get the first key with Art3mis, until (more spoilers) he hesitates before entering the last crystal gate and getting the chance to win Hallidays Easter egg.
Up to this moment, Wade is experiencing a personal transformation. He moves from someone who basically chooses to do things alone to someone who has a few close friends – including a pseudo girlfriend in Art3mis. Then he becomes someone who is alone again and alienated from everyone who is important to him, before finally becoming someone who is willing to risk everything and sacrifice for his friends.
As he goes through this maturation process, he learns the story of Halliday, a tragic model from someone who decided to alienate his friends because of his creation, the OASIS.
In other words, the ascending action makes a choice whether Wade like Halliday, his hero, will learn critical lessons from Halliday and share the power with his friends.
The ascending action also belongs to every act and every scene
Your story needs emerging action, but also every action and even every scene.
That means that in an average novel, film, or script with fifty to seventy scenes, you should make fifty to seventy ascending actions and fifty to seventy climatic decisions.
Why so many?
Because this is the heart of the drama: complications that lead to conflicts between values and lead to a choice. If you don't have increasingly difficult complications and make increasingly important decisions, you have no history.
So find out what decisions your characters have to make and then build them up using the ascending action.
What is an example of rising action in a movie or novel that you particularly like? Let us know in the comments.
WORK OUT
Let's apply the concept of rising action with a creative writing exercise. I want you to do the following:
List five possible complications based on the following climatic choices:
Love OR money
After listing your complications with this selection, use one of them as a creative write prompt to write a new scene.
For example, I could write this for a complication: "A rich woman falls in love with a poor man." Then I could write a scene in which she is torn between her status and her love.
What other complications can you imagine? Which scene will you choose to write?
Write for fifteen minutes. When your time is up, post your practice in the comment section. When posting, give feedback to at least three other authors.
Have fun writing!
Joe Bunting
