If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, you’ll have been introduced to the narrative arc chart. It basically looks like a shark’s fin or crooked mountain. It’s a pretty standard visualization for the general structure of the story. You have the base of the fin/mountain as your beginning. This is where you front load a lot of your exposition and world building. You’re spending a lot of time describing your characters and explaining the setting. Generally, the action is fairly slow, the tension is low and your stakes are rather mild. The beginning generally ends with the introduction of the main conflict.

This is where the graph begins to ascend. Classified as “the middle,” your story’s narrative starts to coalesce around the action beats that define the central conflict of the story. Stakes are raised as your character’s fears are tested. Motivation is put on trial as obstacles begin to hold the protagonist back from their goals. You have a rising tension during this portion as your protagonist faces setbacks and failures and pressure builds to a breaking point. Much like the beginning, the middle typically ends at the height of conflict, often called the climax, where the protagonist and antagonists face off for the final confrontation. 

Like a pressure valve, the climax is the point where all the story’s conflict is met head on. While the peak of tension is the tail end of your middle, the conclusion of your story marks the end. This is the drop of your mountain or the fall of the fin. With the climax, your conflict reaches some definitive resolution and rather precipitously, the tension of the story is dispersed. In classic good versus evil narratives, this would be the fall or death of the villain. As such, much of the ending is typically reserved for tying up loose ends, explaining the fallout of the conflict and delivering the payoff for the protagonist’s journey – typically with them reaching their goal or resolving their motivation. 

Now, this is a pretty basic format. It’s like learning how to structure your first essay. And while the concept is simple, the execution is actually quite difficult. This is where we get into pacing. Trying to determine how long each section should be and how best to ramp up and release your tension. You can’t have too slow of an introduction. Too much exposition will bog down the story and drain readers’ interest. It would be like starting a race accelerating from the finishing line and then immediately starting to pump the brakes. Really, you don’t want to explode from the start. You want to create a burst of interest with your initial hook and then gradually accelerate into your tension. 

And reaching the climax is a delicate balance as well. Your middle portion is all about juggling the right mix of steadily building conflict but not hurrying past important character development and context that will deprive your reader of the satisfaction of your conclusion. If you don’t provide enough justification for the final confrontation then your pay off in the end will often come across as undeserved or even contrived. The reader wants to feel that the protagonist has struggled and earned their reward at the end. Hurrying too fast into the climax and resolving it too quickly will make it seem like either the challenge wasn’t really there or that the writer arbitrarily arranged things in the protagonist’s favour so there was never really any threat in the first place. 

As for pitfalls in the conclusion, it’s probably the most forgiving portion of the narrative arc. That said, too abrupt of an ending can leave the reader with more questions than answers. Which if you’re hoping to build an audience either for sequels or entice them to other stories then it might leave a sour taste in their mouth. Too long of a conclusion can result in the Lord of the Rings meandering finale where your readers just sort of lose interest and start skipping to the final pages. Chances are, however, that if they stuck through until this part of the story, they’ll probably see it through to the end. So, in my experience, authors generally indulge in wrapping up the stories and the fates of the characters involved. 

This is mostly just an introduction to the basics of pacing. However, getting the right speed for your narrative development is a very difficult and very tricky process. There’s lots of stories, professionally written, that still stumble with getting just the right speed. In future posts, I’ll outline some advice on how to pace your story properly. But for now, I’ll just conclude that generally pacing is a primary focus during the editing stage. When you’re first drafting, you can afford to have a bit of a wonky narrative arc that can be smoothed out later.

When writing your story, do keep some consideration for your climax. What is your final confrontation that will resolve the central tension of your book? And how can you steadily ramp up your tension to that final, explosive moment?