Is it really important for you to have climax in every single story you read? As many of you already know from English class in high school, the critical parts of a story are rising action, climax, and falling action.
If your story removes the climax but still has a rise and fall, that is where the reader yawns. If I invest my time into reading a big build up only to have it fall without that big exciting moment, what’s the point? I don’t want to go right from conflict to resolution; I want some really “edge of your seat” stuff to happen in between.
If I remove the rising action and falling action, which means that there is no build up to the conflict and no slope at the end of it, I can create a story that is 100% “edge of your seat.” That is hard to write, exciting for the reader but hard to write. As a writer, you will have to figure out how to explain the conflict that lead up to this point without slowing down the action to get there. You could resort to flash backs, but . . . yeah, LAME. You also want to give your reader a sense of finality at the end of the story. The reader wants some sort of end, even if it is the “good guy” dieing.
I’m not sold on the idea that there are really compelling stories without any sort of climax at all, but I don’t think that a story requires a strategic rise and fall action. For my two cents, I think every story needs the 3 following.
- Conflict
- Climax
- Resolution
Interesting stories often put those three elements in a different order, sometimes cutting them up and spreading them out. For instance, you might start a story with the resolution, as with American Beauty, which was then followed by the conflict then the climax, and the resolution was repeated and fully flushed out at the end.
What are your thoughts on story telling? Does there have to be a formula at all?
