Is Freytag’s Pyramid one of those things which should be killed when writing a Dramatica story? Should I be concerned about it at all?
As much as you’re concerned about a ham sandwich.
In a simplistic way, Freytag’s Pyramid is comprised of six segments (they say five, but if you look at the illustration it is six). If you think of the Exposition segment (#1) as a prologue, and the Denoument segment (#6), the remaining four segments are similar to the four signposts/acts. What is odd is the way in which Freytag’s Pyramid story points appear to have inconsistent frames of reference.
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Maybe it’s just nomenclature, or the scale is off, but Freytag’s Pyramid seems odd in how it shows the Climax occurring so much before the Resolution. Most stories I can think of, the Climax occurs just before the Resolution.
The one thing I do like is the reminder to include Denouement. When a story ends immediately after it resolves it can leave a bad taste, at least for me. Perhaps this is because the Denouement often serves a purpose in confirming the Outcome and Judgment and sometimes other story points. Showing a scene or two after the last Story Driver (Concluding Event) is a great way to confirm that yes, the conflict is now resolved, and this is how it turned out for everyone.
This also ties in well with Jim’s advice to consider tying up other throughline(s) after the last Story Driver. I think he uses the example of having RS Signpost 4 after that Driver. This can really give the audience that feeling of “yes, I know they won, but I still HAVE to keep reading”.
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I had a mentor who suggested that I use Freytag’s Pyramid, but I didn’t really get it until I saw it broken down by the creator of Lessons from the Screenplay on YouTube. Here’s a screenshot of how he compares the two:
And here’s a screenshot of how he suggested being able to use Freytag’s Pyramid as a Five-Act Structure within a Three-Act Paradigm (or Four-Act, if you split the middle):
He used the first Avengers movie to break down the Five-Act Structure in the first video that he did about it, which I found really useful. And the thing that really cleared things up for me was that the Climax in Freytag’s Pyramid isn’t the “Climax” that I’m used to. It’s just the point where the emotional tension between the characters reaches its boiling point. The example from the Avengers movie was when all of the Avengers were arguing in the lab about S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secret plan.
The creator of the vidoe replaces Rising Action with Complications, which would coincide with Resistance in the PRCO model, and Resolution/Denouement with Catastrophe, which would coincide with Outcome/Power (in my head, anyway). That would leave Exposition as the Potential and Climax as the Conflict. And if you combine the Falling Action and Catastrophe in Act Four, you still have a Four-Act structure that can work with the Signposts.
Personally, I’ve been looking at Signpost Four for the IC and OS throughlines as the Falling Action, and the the MC and RS scenes for the Resolution and Denouement. Sometimes I change the order and all that, but it kind of works for me.
Here’s the video if you want to check it out.
Structurally-speaking, there is no need for the prologue or epilogue/denoument. However, as far as storytelling (and storyweaving) is concerned, it’s often useful to spread the reveal of the events over more time, for which the denoument certainly allows. The pre- and post-story segments are also terrific for providing additional context to the story beyond the boundaries of the self-contained story(form).
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I always wonder about this. Is this how I would handle something like setting up the Normal World of the story before the Initial Driver, or is the Initial Driver supposed to be contained within the Normal World? I get that I’m mixing Subjective and Objective, but is there an answer to that question?
Storyform-wise, the inciting event and the closing event start and stop the story. At the point of the inciting event, the established balance is disrupted and the response to the new imbalance moves forward. Everything has found a new balance/imbalance by the closing event. This is the truly objective, Dramatica perspective of story.
Storytelling and storyweaving-wise, it takes time and space to reveal initial balance needed for the audience to recognize the importance of the disruption created by the inciting event. In practice, this means you have a lot of latitude in how and when you reveal this information to an audience. Different forms of storytelling, as well as cultural norms and storytelling conventions, influence how stories are related to an audience and reflect the wide variety of storyweaving styles and sequencing.
For these reasons, there isn’t a definitive way to establish a story’s givens for an audience, nor a limit to the possible proscribed ways to wrap a story up – not to mention everything that happens between the middle and the end. The closest one can come to storyweaving the storyform is to weave the story as closely to the plot as possible. Even that is difficult because storyforms contain many storypoints that co-exist in time and (at least for temporally told stories such as films, plays, and novels), it takes time to describe those simultaneous story points before moving forward in the plot.
(Sorry this is a bit in the weeds. The short answer is – Objectively, a story is fully self contained between the inciting event and the closing event. Subjectively, the inciting event can be introduced just about anywhere, so long as the audience is able to reconstruct the plot and put the story back into the order of events based on the internal timeline, which need not match the order in which story elements are presented to they audience.)
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Thank you for this! This resolves a huge dilemma that I’ve been having in finding the starting point of my story. I’ve been thinking that the Initial Driver has to be at the very beginning of the story, and I’ve been wondering how to handle the storytelling/storyweaving parts of the Normal World and such.
Yes! That’s exactly how I feel, too. No matter how much I like the movie, You’ve Got Mail infuriates me for this. The shop war stuff (OS) comes to an end and then there’s 0 resolution as to how it actually worked out. We get the RS resolution, which works fine, but there’s so much logistic stuff that I’m like… how are they going to get beyond this? Where do the employees go? How are they handling it? Just one or two scenes would have completely resolved that. A quick denouement outside of the relationship.
Anyway, that’s kind of off-topic but Gah! Denouements save lives. Or attention spans. They save attention spans. Not as catchy, though.
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With all respect to Mr. Huntley and @jhull, this might be a point where screenwriting and prose writing are different. In prose, you need to capture your reader’s attention immediately on page 1 and don’t let go. A giant wall of text before they get to the first driver is going to make it harder to do that. I believe you really should start with your first driver and learn how to unobtrusively weave the exposition in later (sans flashbacks).
With a movie, the viewer is constantly exposed to the trailers, the posters, the reviews, etc. long before they sit down to see the actual movie. Plus, it is a lot easier to stay seated in a dark room rather than disturb the other viewers. The viewer is willing to give the movie fifteen minutes to get started. With a novel, you really don’t know when the cool part you saw in the (non-existent) trailer is going to start or if the giant wall of text is going to keep on continuing until chapter 309 because the author is a talentless hack. With a novel, the book is sitting there on the shelf alongside many others which can be freely browsed through. You’re standing there on your feet at the bookstore and, once the cover of the book convinces you to pick it up, if it doesn’t grab your attention within seconds, then you will be browsing another book. The back panel will help, but the reader will soon be reading text inside.
I can see your point. However, there’s a big difference between establishing the Normal World and hitting the reader with a wall of text.
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But, you can start with your first driver and still establish the Normal World while never dropping down to exposition-speed.
Not in the weeds, enormously clarifying.
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I guess the point is, it’s not required structurally, in either novels or movies. Storyweaving can vary a lot.
I personally love the long, scene-setting openings of some of those 19th century novels.
That said, I agree that its important to catch the audience’s attention right away if possible, but there are probably a lot of ways to do that.
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You’re treating two things as being inextricably linked that really aren’t. Capturing a reader’s attention is done any number of ways – most crucially through compelling writing. However the reader has no idea whether that first line/page/scene is dealing with the first driver (i.e. the thing that’s going to prove to have set off all the subsequent story conflicts) or whether it has nothing to do with that first driver and is simply an exciting, engaging scene.
When people talk about prologues or flashbacks being boring, they’re often envisioning – as you put it – large walls of text that don’t involve characters or genuine emotional drama. But there’s no place in a book where you can suddenly dump large walls of dull text (which is why people who sell books on “How to write kick-ass beginnings!” almost always end up also selling books titled “How to write kick-ass middles” followed by “How to write kick-ass endings”).
Every book in my Greatcoats series begins with what is effectively a prologue. Not one of those prologues was a wall of description and not one of them constituted a first driver in the Dramatica sense.
When you use a prologue, it’s job is to create a bridge between the reader and the story. The reader is often coming to the book after a day of work at some desk or factory floor. Jarring them into “Carrelia leapt upon the masselvack’s scaled back and dug her heals into its coffveve wings. Drawing her muklupi blade she screamed, ‘Death to the Burstelbassels! Life for Jubliga!’ as her Undenhoudt horde followed close behind, shouting her name over and over” isn’t a great way to bring the reader into the story world. Neither is a twenty-page wall of historical description.
There’s a natural urge as a writer to seek rules because without them there’s no inherent measure to figure out if what you’re about to write is any good. Unfortunately, however, the only rules that hold the test of time are ones that are inherently unhelpful, such as the great adage for all art: “Don’t be boring.”
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And you’ll note that I never said that it was.
No, what I said was to start with the first driver.
Here’s some examples,
“On September 23, 12 seconds into 8:35GMT, Ganymede, Jupiter’s moon, vanished.”
“I found my father’s body at Frog Lake. He had been shot.”
“Something is following us.”
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The most compelling beginning I’ve read in a while was Beyonders, a YA fantasy by Brandon Mull. The book began with a backstory prologue (an event from 15 years ago). But what really drew me in was the first chapter, about a boy hitting balls at the batting cage with his friends, then reporting for work at the zoo. The First Driver is on page 18.
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And that’s awesome.
There will always be exceptions, even to Dramatica. But, I really wouldn’t advise building a career on trying to find an exception.
If you look at the contrast in our two examples (mine being tonally facetious, of course), you’ll note a crucial difference: yours are set in easily understandable contexts that don’t require the reader to know or understand anything about the world they’re in. We all know that Jupiter has moons, even if we can’t name them, so we know what having one of them disappear will mean to everyone – we can imagine a public panic, newscast footage, conspiracy theorists, military generals talking invasion…etc. We all know what it means to find dad dead at a lake with a bullet.
But not all settings or contexts are implicitly understood (hence my use of lots of bizarre in-world terminology.) The novel might not be about people dealing with regular people interpretations of things. It might involve an unfamiliar world with unfamiliar customs and unfamiliar relationships. That’s why the sci-fi and fantasy genres have often sought to use prologues as a means to create a bridge between the reader and the world of the story.
A large proportion of the crime novels and thrillers I’ve read recently use prologues to set up the character. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s not. However the ones that try to start inside the action with an initial driver are equally uneven – sometimes it works, sometimes it feels incredibly rushed and you get this important event without any character context with which to interpret how it affects them. So then you end up having to find out after that the person who discovered dad’s body either loved dad or hated dad, and the immediate emotional impact of that scene is lost.
It’s funny you say that because I find I spend a huge amount of my time as a novelist trying to find exceptions – looking for a different way to set a scene or give twist things around. My fourth novel, Tyrant’s Throne, has a 17K opening that has almost no direct connection to the events of the rest of the book except that it parallels the entire story in miniature – something the reader (and characters) only realize at the very end of the book. That doesn’t mean its genius or that everyone will love it, but the series has been successful so I keep trusting the instinct to look for different ways to approach the stories.
To put it more simply: there’s nothing inherently wrong with beginning with your initial driver, nor is there anything inherently wrong with a prologue. They’re two of a range of tools available to novelists and generally speaking, it’s best to keep that toolbox as full as possible.
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