Excerpt
Looking at Feralt's Triangle, we see the pieces in a new light. Beginning, Middle, Ending. Introduction, rising action, falling action. Feralt's Triangle is a graphical depiction of Three-Act Structure, using a second dimension to show action or tension. It led me to my summary of Three-Act Structure:
•Something changes.
•Things get worse.
•Pay the price.
Something changes is the inflection point between Act I and Act II. The world is normal (for whatever "normal" means in your character's world) until something changes. Then you're in Act II, Rising Action: Things get worse. Finally, at the climax, you Pay the price to overcome the real challenge. Or in some stories, you flinch, you don't pay the price, and we see how that turns for the worse.
The concept behind Pay the price relates to a theory of storytelling that says that during the Rising Action, part of why things get worse is that the protagonist is solving the wrong problem: they're responding to events around them, while avoiding the real action that they should take. They might not be one-hundred percent reactive, and certainly not passive. (Passive protagonists piss me off.) But they're not tackling the real problem. Some story theorists argue that a solid story has two conflicts, an external and internal. The external is the visible, obvious problem to be solved, while the internal is what's really wrong–something wrong within the protagonist themselves. It's some necessary change that they're resisting, perhaps out of fear, or obsession, or any number of other character flaws. These are things that either blind the character to the real problem, or give the character an excuse to avoid the real problem. If I can just solve this external conflict, I won't have to deal with my internal conflict!
In this theory, then, the climax is when every other option has been stripped away. The protagonist has to solve the internal conflict to succeed–or can adamantly refuse to solve it, and suffer the consequences. The first path is triumph, the second is tragedy. If you go back to the Greek definition of tragedy, it's not just a story where things go wrong: it's a story were things go wrong because of the character's inherent flaw. And most often, that flaw is one of their strengths, but taken to an extreme. The character is a proud ruler, so proud that they cannot take a humbling step that might save the kingdom. They'd rather the kingdom crash. Then they give up their pride. Or the character thinks they're smarter than the gods, the classic Greek tragic flaw of hubris: the character is so sure of their course that the gods use that to lead them to disaster.
So in my formulation of Three-Act Structure, there is Pay the price, or Refuse the price, the latter leading to tragedy.
Now if you're a real bastard toward your characters, you can add in Pay the price, and everything still falls apart. If futility and nihilism are your thing, I'm not going to stop you from writing that. This is the moment when you prove your philosophy. You lead your protagonist right up to the point where everything has to lead to victory… and instead they get defeat, because there's no reason in the world, there's no justice, and you can't win no matter how hard you try. If you want to tell that story, great; and then your Falling Action is going to be watching your character suffer in misery as all their plans lead to failure.
