Hello! Mr. Sato here to explain plot structure. In this video, I'm assuming that you want to write a plot for some kind of story.
Or maybe identify the plot parts of some story you've read. It could be any kind of narrative. A short story, a play, a screenplay, a memoir, or even a novel. Don't worry.
If you've ever heard a story or watched a movie, you can do this. We'll mainly focus on Freitag's Triangle, but we'll also touch on other kinds of plot structure. When teachers talk about plot structure, they usually teach Freytag's Triangle.
I know I do, because Freytag's Triangle is really useful. Most stories will fit this arc pretty closely, and you can see why it's called a triangle. So, the six parts of Freytag's Triangle are 1. Exposition, 2. Main Conflict, 3. Rising Action, 4. Climax, 5. Falling Action, and 6. Resolution or Denouement. The first one, exposition, is the background knowledge that you need to know in order to understand the story. Who are the characters?
Where is it taking place? What's going on? What's the situation?
Maybe you've read the book The Hunger Games or seen the movie, the first one from 2012. In the beginning of that story, we learn that this young woman, Katniss Everdeen, is an archer and a good one too. We learn about her friends and her 12-year-old little sister who's really meek and mild. We...
learned that these are people living in some future society where food is scarce for regular people like them, and that there are these horrible battle-to-the-death sort of games held once a year put on by very powerful and wealthy people like these who are definitely not starving. Before the really exciting part of the plot begins, you have to know all this stuff or you won't understand. If you walked into the movie just 13 minutes late, you wouldn't really understand everything that was going on. All that is exposition. The necessary background stuff.
Who they are, where they are, what's going on, that kind of thing. That is exposition. Now we come to the main conflict. Katniss's little sister is chosen by Lottery to fight in the games. She obviously doesn't stand a chance of surviving, so Katniss volunteers to fight in her place.
Now we have a main conflict, and that is, will Katniss be killed in the games, or will she kill other people? including her friend Pita, and be the last fighter standing. That's the main conflict of the rest of the movie. The main conflict is the main struggle between opposing forces. It could be an external conflict like this one in The Hunger Games, right?
It's a conflict between her and other people. It's external. Or it could be an internal conflict, like somebody struggling with a moral choice of some kind. Most good stories usually have more than one conflict going on.
Pause. Let's go back to exposition for a minute. Now that we've established the main conflict, do you see why exposition is important? If you didn't know what the Hunger Games were, you might think, hey, it's a game.
Might be like football. Could be fun, right? If you didn't know about Katniss's adorable little sister, you wouldn't know that being picked for the game meant her certain death.
If you didn't know Pita was her friend, you wouldn't understand how horrible it is that one of them is going to have to kill the other. If you didn't know she was an archer, you wouldn't be able to infer that if she can get her hands on a bow, she might have a good chance of surviving. Beginning writers sometimes don't understand the value of good exposition and they skimp on it.
Don't do that. That would be a mistake. The third part of the plot is the rising action. For the reader, this is the most fun part of the story, so don't rush through it.
In this section, you build suspense. You make us feel the push and pull of the conflict. First, it looks like she'll die. then it looks like she might survive, then she's almost killed, then she sort of indirectly kills someone else.
It's back and forth tension, and that tension is where the fun is. Some beginning writers, and I've seen this, set up their conflict and then solve it in the next paragraph. Where's the fun in that?
After the rising action, when the tension is at its highest, you reach the climax, this point here, the top. The climax is where the main conflict is resolved. In the Hunger Games, Katniss and her friend Peta are the last two survivors.
One friend will have to kill the other for the game to end. They come up with a creative solution to avoid this horrible outcome. They will both eat poison berries. They'll both die together, so neither will have to kill the other.
However, Having all the fighters die is not acceptable to the organizers of the game, so they decide the only solution open to them is to stop Katniss and Peter from killing themselves, end the game, and have two winners. That's the climax. Now remember, the main conflict was whether Katniss would live or die.
That's the question. The main conflict is the question. The climax is the answer to that question. So the climax and the conflict should usually match, unless the question has evolved into something else by the time you get to the climax, and a lot of writers do that too. Some stories end right there, right after the climax, but there are still two more steps in Freitag's Triangle.
The next one is called Falling Action. I often tell my students that it's okay to skip Falling Action. It is a period after the climax where nothing is really happening.
The plot stops for a bit and we feel the repercussions of what just happened. I think covering the falling action in no more than a sentence or two, or even skipping it entirely, can be a good choice. The last part is the resolution or denouement, a French word meaning the untying of the knot. So the resolution is where you, the writer, show your reader how the character and the world of this story have changed as a result of all these events. In The Hunger Games, we see that our main character, Katniss, has been transformed from a hungry young hunter who's totally unknown and unimportant to anyone who doesn't know her, into a huge international media star who now represents games she doesn't believe in, and in a surprising paradox, is actually an inspiration to the increasing number of people who are opposed to these horrible games.
So we see how the events of the story have changed the main character and changed the world of this story. That's what the resolution should do. Some stories, like the most dangerous game, just imply the exposition without actually stating it.
That's a little tricky, it's subtle, but it's another way to go if you think you can pull it off. And those are the parts of Freytag's Triangle. Most stories you know follow this pattern with maybe a variation or two, like Star Wars put some of its exposition in a scroll at the very beginning, or how some stories will start at a more exciting moment, like at the beginning of the main conflict maybe, and reveal the exposition a little later in a flashback. But almost every story you know will follow most of this pattern.
It's a really helpful planning tool for writers. Okay, now I'll only spend a few minutes talking about other ways to organize plot. The first one is the hero's journey.
We have the scholar Joseph Campbell to thank for this. Every English teacher I've ever known knows this one. It really isn't all that different from the triangle, but its structure is more circular.
With the hero's journey, I always think of Luke Skywalker, so here I'll say he instead of he or she. The hero starts from a bad place, like he's suffering in some way. Luke is bored. Some sort of inciting incident pushes the hero forward into his adventure. He gets help from teachers and other friends along the way.
He enters a strange new world, faces challenges, gives himself over to something greater than himself, conquers those initial challenges, and then faces the big one, the supreme ordeal. Sometimes he conquers the enemy, and sometimes he loses. He sacrifices himself, and then is resurrected. More powerful than ever, like Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Then the hero returns home to benefit his society in some way. Sometimes he faces more challenges on the way back home, though this doesn't happen in Star Wars until Episode 6. All of this could fit in Freytag's triangle, but the return home at the end is what makes it a little different. Plus, the hero's journey comes with a lot of its own fun elements, but that's a story for another video.
Kisho Tenketsu For the next plot structure, I have to thank Dr. David Reinhardt of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, whose page on narrative structures introduced me to this concept. I recognized the structure from having read it in books and seen it in movies, but didn't know it had a name. This one is called Kishotenketsu, which is Japanese. It has four stages, which are, logically enough, ki, sho, ten, and ketsu. Ki is the introduction, same as exposition really.
Sho is the development. TEN is the twist, and KETSU, which is the conclusion. One example Dr. Reinhardt gives is the Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin. In the first stage, which is called KI, a young woman with a heart condition learns that her husband has been killed in a train accident.
We learn who she is and what her situation is. That's the introduction, the stage called KI. In the second stage, SHOU, we see her thought processes as she goes through different stages of reaction. First she weeps. Then she imagines a life without him, and sees that her new life could be freer and less constrained than it has been.
Then she begins to be very happy, even joyous. This is the development stage. In the third stage, Ting, there is a plot twist.
It's a kind of climax, but it must be unexpected. In this case, we learn that there has been a mistake and her husband is not really dead after all. It's a twist.
In the final stage, Ketsu, the sudden change from joy to, what, fear, grief, and awareness that she has to go back into the box that she thought she'd just been freed from. is a terrible shock. The young woman drops dead. Ketsu is the conclusion.
In this final stage, we look back at the events and situations of the story and see them now from a different perspective. A movie example Dr. Reinhold gives is the 2010 movie Inception. I think of the classic American stories Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. Certain Twilight Zone episodes come to my mind as well. Then there's the episodic plot.
Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels falls into this category. In longer forms like novels, you can have a lot of small challenges, episodes that may be completely unrelated to each other with no big climax at the end. The tension rises and falls over and over.
The main character goes through the story experiencing all these adventures and is sometimes no different at the end than he or she was at the beginning. TV shows often do this as well. So we've looked at four ways to structure your story.
Freitag's Triangle, The Hero's Journey, Kishotenketsu, and the Episodic Form. Here are some time indexes so you can go back and re-watch the parts that you're interested in. There are really no hard and fast rules regarding plot structure, but a good story should have a beginning, middle, and end.
I think everybody would agree with that. The Greek philosopher Aristotle had some very influential ideas about tragedies and comedies. Edgar Allan Poe had a few short story rules too. Modern writers in the 20th century broke up these structures and rearranged them in non-linear ways.
For example, the end of the book might reveal the actual chronological beginning of the story. So these structures, these frameworks, are really useful tools for writers who are planning and outlining their narratives, especially beginning writers. But don't let the framework turn into a cage.
They're tools, not rules. This is an art form after all. The main thing is that you tell a compelling story.
Your teacher may require that you include all the steps as a writing exercise. I've done that. But otherwise, if it's a good story, no one will care that it was missing this piece or that one. They'll just remember that it was a good story.
Alright, now go have some fun creating your story.