Plot Diagram Introduction to Plot Diagram Terminology

Plot Diagram

Introduction to Plot Diagram Terminology

Short stories

All short stories have a plot that follows basic pattern

Freytag’s Pyramid

Exposition

Complications (Rising Action)

Climax

Falling Action

Resolution

Exposition (basic Situation)

opening of the story

characters and their conflicts are introduced

Attention:

You

must follow the story until the

main conflict is introduced.

This may be a few pages into the story.

Rising Action (complications)

main character takes action to resolve the main conflict, but he/she meets with more problems or complications:

danger, hostility, fear, or even a new threatening situation

Climax

peak of the plot diagram

most important things about the climax:

turning point of the story

something happens that can’t be reversed

most emotional part

key scene in the story

the tense, exciting, or terrifying moment when our emotional involvement is the greatest

Resolution

Occurs at the end

all struggles are over

Wraps Up the story:

We know what is going to happen to the characters.

The

Wait by Patrick

Johanneson

She

planted the seed and waited. After a while rain came down from the sky, pelting her skin, chilling her. She shivered but didn't leave, not yet.

The

sun came out, warming the soil, driving the cold from her bones. She waited. Clouds scudded by overhead, in a hurry for some reason. The moon rose, stars wheeled, and then the sun rose again.She

didn't just wait, of course. She prayed, she sang, she read the old stories, the myths and the legends. On the seventh day she snoozed under a cloudless sky, waking only briefly when a dragonfly happened to touch down on her nose. She observed its cathedral-window wings, iridescent with refracted sunlight, and drowsed once more after it left her.

Rain, sun, moon, stars: she endured them all. The seedling broke the soil with a questing green curlicue, looking for all the world like a question mark in the Old Tongue. She sat on it and waited more: days, months, decades.A boy came along and asked her why she'd climbed to the top of the tree.

"I didn't," she said.

Exposition: Planted a seed

Complications (Rising Action

):

-It rained, but she didn’t leave.

-Sun came out, set, and rose again.

-Slept, sang, prayed

Climax: Bloom broke soil

Falling

Action:

Sat on it and waited longer - decades

Resolution:

She was at the top of her tree.