Narratives are built with several “building blocks”: dialogue, description, characters, actions, conflict, and character-reflections. Good authors mix in bits of all these to create their stories, but leaving out any one of these pieces can leave a story feeling unfinished, unsatisfying.
The structure of a narrative follows a general pattern.
- Exposition: The backstory is revealed; characters, setting, and the conflict are introduced; and the “stage is set” for the story itself.
- Rising Action: The intensity builds towards the climax: The conflict grows, whether interpersonal or internal, every action and conversation is leading to a “moment of truth.”
- Climax: Moment of highest intensity, often called the “point of no return,” or “the turning point.” This is the moment when the protagonist faces off against the antagonist and the result usually resolves the conflict.
- Falling Action: What happens after the climax, leading to the final resolution of the conflict. Falling action often shows the consequences of the climax, but it can be like connective tissue joining the climax to the end of the story. It’s often very short.
- Resolution: The ending of the story in which the conflict is shown to be resolved (usually). In some cases, the conflict seems unresolved, even after the climax. This situation is more accurately described by denouement, a literary term that means “the plot unraveled.”
The story we’ll be using to illustrate narrative structure (at least to start us off) is “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier.
Read it. You’ll need an understanding of the story to fully grasp the examples used in the next few lessons.