We always look for patterns to make sense of our lives. We tell the story of our life, usually with a beginning, middle, end, with crisis, conflict and hopefully, resolution. Think about when you tell your friends some incident that happened to you – it forms itself into a narrative with a beginning, middle, end, a punchline, a surprise maybe, a climax, a point. All stories have a pattern, and it is a surprisingly regular one. Gustav Freytag (1816–95), a German novelist, identified this pattern diagrammatically, in what is now known and Freytag’s pyramid. A story begins with an introduction, a setting of the scene, and the drive of the story. The thrust of the story is the ‘inciting incident’ that begins the ‘complication’ where some force sets the protagonist into motion. The ‘rising action’ of the story builds to a ‘climax’ at the apex of the pyramid where things fall apart or reach a head, and all action rises to this moment, and then begins falling away from into a ‘falling action’ before the final ‘catastrophe’ or ‘unravelling’ or ‘denouement’ or the story’s final outcome.
Most stories roughly follow this pattern or rise and fall, and most Hollywood movies do too. It is a formula that works and helps us make sense of the world in terms of a satisfying pattern of rise and fall. For example, look at any story or novel and plot the narrative on a graph and it will on average form itself into a pyramid shape. Even the way we tell anecdotes or yarns follows this pattern.
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