You’ve invested weeks (months! years!) of hard work writing your story, and it all comes down to this... The end. The last line. No pressure.
In writing, plot is the sequence of events that guides a narrative such as a novel, short story, play, or film. Every time a character makes a choice or reacts to the consequences of a choice, the plot of the story moves forward. This pattern of cause and effect hurtles the protagonis...
Freytag was chiefly focused on tragedy, not comedy, and he saw theendingphase of a story as the moment of catastrophe, in which the main character is finally undone by their own choices, actions, and energy. After the catastrophe is a moment of catharsis, where the action of the story is...
the man who hired them, takes one of them hostage, and the story closes with the crew rethinking their aims and what they mean to each other. Their quest is far from over, and they begin to hatch a plan for securing the safe return of their friend and retrieving the money they are ...
He was also almost solely interested in tragedy, spending very little time analyzing stories with happy endings, and it seems as though this hyperfocus on tragedy influenced his thinking about the shapes of story, because Freytag’s Pyramid bears a direct correlation to the Icarus story arc. The...
News worthiness and story choices: Two sensational examples.Discusses issues related to the video coverage of the murder of reporter Daniel Pearl and an interview of kidnapping and assault victims Tamara Brooks and Jacque Marris. Difference in the attention given by media institutions to the stories;...
Most of the time, writers should avoid anticlimactic endings by ensuring they follow through on most of the story strands established early in the story. However, in just the right story and under the right circumstances, you can cap off your story with a low-key climax. It can be jarring...
Unexpected endings of stories create situational irony. O. Henry, especially good at situational irony, demonstrates its use in "The Gift of the Magi", memorable for its ironic ending. In the story, a poor couple, James and Della Dillingham, want to buy expensive Christmas gifts for each ...
A motif is a repeated element appearing throughout a story that contributes to a major theme and often conveys a deeper meaning. It’s basically bling for film and fiction, a pop of creative color that shows up to make the work more thought-provoking. ...
While a great many endings do this, not all of them do. Moreover, the dénouement of a story is a specific section of the story, which itself has a beginning and ending. Here are a few of the key defining features of dénouement to help you identify it: It follows the falling action...