Reading Plot Structure

Poll

Do you like stories with background information and few surprises, or do you prefer the adventure of the unknown?

• I prefer comfort!

• I prefer adventure!

• I like both!

• I don't know; it depends on how the story turns out.

Understand Story Structure

When you're reading a story, think of yourself as a traveler moving through the action, just as the characters are. The author structures this journey for you, the reader, just like she or he structures the characters' journey.

How do authors make this journey interesting — even exciting? How do they draw readers ever deeper into the action? In this activity, we'll look at some of the ways authors get us to care about their stories.

Let's start out by looking at story structures. Gustav Freytag (1816 – 1895) was a German playwright and critic who had an idea. He noticed that many complex narratives seemed to follow a basic structure. That structure is now known as Freytag's pyramid.

Freytag's pyramid has five parts or stages: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and conclusion. Let's take a closer look at each stage.

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The Structure of Stories

You know that exciting feeling that comes with developing a crush on someone? The exposition is where the author gives the reader the chance to fall in love with the story — it's all about getting to know the background information that sets up the main action of that story. It typically establishes the time and location, introduces some of the characters, and starts planting seeds for the conflict to come.

The setting and characters serve as emotional anchors for the narrative the audience is going to experience, and as such, are often centrally important to the beginning of a story.

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Begin at the Beginning: The Exposition

​Exposition gives the audience somewhere to start and a map of where to go.

By using exposition to give readers the chance to fall in love with a story, the author makes the audience care about what happens to the story's characters.

This is where tension comes in. When you care about someone, you also care about the ways conflict could affect them. The same thing is true for characters in a story. Authors play up tension in stories to draw audiences further into the narrative, making readers care more and more about the characters and their struggles.

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Building Tension through Characters

​Authors use elements of a story to hold up the narrative and make the audience feel tension.

Being introduced to characters and seeing how they act in a story is a good way to use characterization to get the audience invested in the narrative. Learning about the setting in the exposition also helps the audience identify with the narrative.

The setting is more than the place where the action occurs, just as your home, your town, and your country are more than just where you happen to live. Setting gives the audience clues about the actions each character may take and why.

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What Makes a Character: Setting and Characterization

Open Ended

Briefly describe this setting in your own words.

Once the exposition gets you rolling, the tension begins to mount, and things start to get exciting. The rising action is the part of the story that is a bit more dynamic than the straightforward exposition.

Rising action is full of, well, action. This is the part of the story that twists and turns, and it's also where characterization is in full swing, and readers learn more about the main characters. Rising action helps the audience anticipate that the story will creep closer and closer to an inevitable moment where everything will finally be decided.

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Something's Coming: Rising Action

Multiple Choice

Which of the following has the potential for the most exciting action, in your opinion?

• You are about to open a birthday present.

• You are 100 miles from shore when your lifeboat springs a fast leak.

• You go out on a drive.

• You suddenly realize you have lost your memory and don't know where you are.

• The mangy black dog growls, about to attack.

Tension has been building. We're at the breaking point. Somewhere, a drumroll is getting louder. The crucial turning point of the story has come: the climax.

Though it's easy to imagine the climax being a huge explosion of TNT or personalities, a narrative climax can also be very subtle. It can be the moment when a character decides to sell the ring from her first marriage, symbolically ending years of lingering attachment to her first husband. It can be a character's realization that, for all of his money, he's actually envious of the freedom and lifestyle of his landscaper.

Whether the climax is explosive or subtle, it's what all the exposition and rising action in the story have been building toward, after which nothing is the same.

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Tension Perfected: The Climax

​The climax is the point the story has been building toward, when the path of the story takes a crucial turn.

Why don't stories just end at the climax?

If a story is like a teakettle, what part of Freytag's pyramid corresponds with the whistle?

Imagine a boiling teapot. The tension is the pressure inside of the kettle caused by heating up the water. The heat is like the rising action of the story, filling the water with energy and changing it into steam. The pressure in the kettle grows until we hear a whistle: the climax.

Even when the stove is turned off, the pressure in the kettle still has to slowly fade. It's the same with narratives. The author has spent the entire story building up to the moment of greatest pressure, but the audience will still want to know how all the characters dealt with that pressure and how it changed them.

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Tension Released: Falling Action and Conclusion

Multiple Choice

What happens in this part of the pyramid?

• • Climax: This is the point of greatest tension.

• • Exposition: The story gets set up.

Now that you've looked at the traditional story structure, let's focus on some variations. Oral storytelling and written stories can both captivate an audience, but because the forms are different, the storytellers use different techniques. Many of these differences become clear as we look closer at narrative structure.

Think about it: You can't flip back to the last chapter to remember a character's name if you're listening to a story told out loud, and you can't get the same sense of immediate action from a book that you get from hearing a story performed live. The structure of the story has to be adjusted to fit the medium it's presented in.

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Oral and Written Traditions

​The earliest stories weren't written down; people carried them around in their heads.

Freytag's pyramid may make narrative structures seem a little predictable, but when stories began to be written down, predictable structures helped the story make sense to anyone reading it. Making things easy to follow keeps your audience in the loop. It also usually means telling stories in chronological order, where the reader gets information as the main character experiences it.

Epic narratives were a little different. The stories were familiar to the audience, and the storyteller was right there in front of them. This meant that the order of events could be changed and still be recognizable to listeners.

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Changing Chronological Order

Beginning stories in medias res was just one of the ways storytellers played with the structure of oral narratives. Breaking chronological order could transform a familiar, predictable story into something exciting and new.

Another variation to chronological order is the flashback, a scene that shows something that happened earlier in the narrative. Often, a flashback tells information that would have been revealed even before the exposition. The flashback is used often in oral narratives; sometimes it offers more characterization, revealing something the audience didn't know or filling in parts of the narrative the audience needs in order to feel the building of tension.

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Adding Flashbacks to the Mix

Narrative structure wasn't the only thing to change when the medium of storytelling shifted.

The shift from oral to written texts allowed writers to experiment with point of view. They began to be more focused on individuals in conflict with themselves and subtle outside forces than with huge, obvious monsters. The narratives could focus on one person trying to understand himself or herself better, and the point of view of stories became more individual.

At the same time, the audience also changed. Instead of a crowd, the audience became one individual at a time reading the book.

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An Epic Point of View

Another difference between oral epic narratives and written narratives is the monster. In epic narratives of yore, the monster was obvious. Not only could you pick him out of a crowd; you could probably see him coming from a mile away. The conflicts were almost always external.

Written narratives, on the other hand, can show the inner workings of the mind so they often focus on the hero wrestling with internal conflicts—inner monsters, if you will. So an epic poem might focus on a hero grappling with a fearsome foe, but a modern narrative might focus on a hero learning to control his or her fear before a daunting task.

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What is a Hero Without His Monsters?

Repetition, Rhythm, and Rhyme

One more difference between oral and written narratives involves word choice and the way the story sounds when read aloud — the repetition, rhythm, and rhyme. These things aren't as important in written stories, but they helped storytellers memorize oral narratives and keep audiences engaged.

Think of it this way: Would it be easier for you to memorize a paragraph of a story or the lyrics of a song? Probably the latter. The reason for this is that songwriters use repetition, rhythm, and rhyme to build a memorable and enjoyable structure to their lyrics. The same goes for epic narratives.

In Old English epic poems such as Beowulf, authors used things like alliteration and the kenning to make the narratives memorable. For example, every line of Beowulf has heavy alliteration, or repeated consonant sounds. Kennings, or poetic combinations of words to represent common objects, brought the story world to life.

Match

Match the following

• blood

• sun

• honor

• serpent

• sword

battle sweat

sky candle

mind's worth

valley trout

wound hoe

• battle sweat

• sky candle

• mind's worth

• valley trout

• wound hoe

Match

Match the following

• good friend

• sea

• war

• ship

• body

gold-friend

whale road

weather of weapons

sea steed

bone house

• gold-friend

• whale road

• weather of weapons

• sea steed

• bone house

Multiple Choice

______________ is important to an author, because without it the audience would get lost in the narrative.

• Freytag's pyramid

• Flashback

• Grammar

• Structure

Multiple Choice

The earliest stories were __________ stories because books were not always around, easy to make, or easy to maintain.

• oral

• written

• alliteration

• stone-carved

Multiple Choice

The tension in a story builds toward the __________.

• exposition

• narrative

• climax

• falling action

Multiple Choice

The exposition usually progresses in __________ , but some narratives make changes to this to add excitement.

• epic poetry

• flashbacks

• climax

• chronological order

Multiple Choice

__________ can function as characterization when it reveals more about the character, letting the audience know what to expect.

• Individualization

• Writing technology

• Beowulf

• Setting

Multiple Choice

"Broke the bones and set the sun near the nest" is an example of _________

• a kenning

• alliteration

• in media res

• tension

• Complete lesson for Study: Understand Story Structure in Canvas

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• Complete Course Expectation Acknowledgement

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Wrap Up