I accidentally hit the midpoint of Freytag’s pyramid. It sounds like a plane crash, but it’s a story-telling device that makes sense of my new YA novel. Here’s how it goes…
We’re all used to a conventional three-act story structure: short beginning long middle, short ending. The action rises to a climax in Act Three and falls sharply in the wrap-up after the finale.
Novelist Gustav Freytag derived a five-act structure from the Greek texts of Aristotle’s Poetics and the Ars Poetica by Horace. This structure has a ‘climax’ at the mid-point. Freytag visualised story as a pyramid, with his ‘climax’ at the peak in the center.
Now this isn’t the high-point of the plot or action. Freytag identified this as a revelation of a truth or a character. It’s a pivotal moment on which the whole plot turns.
Works of the Old Masters
Followers of the five-act structure, such as one William Shakespeare, know it well. Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, embedded it in his ‘hero’s journey’ structure. Campbell researched story structures right back to, you guessed it, the ancient Greeks.
Masterclass cites the example of Romeo and Juliet, where the mid-point peak is the double murder of Mercutio and Tybalt. Everything goes wrong for the lovers after that. This is tragic drama straight from the Greek playbook. You can see mid-point revelations in other genres, where a protagonist comes to a realization. It could be a clue in a mystery, the discovery of a deception, or the first mastery of their super-power.
Building a pyramid
I accidentally hit Freytag’s mid-point peak in my new YA novel, Kamsen Knights. In the search for her missing father, a friend takes Yari to a fortune teller.
The fortune teller uncovers Yari’s talent, the ability that shaped her childhood. The revelation marks her transition to adulthood and powers her to the end of the story. No spoiler, the story is sub-titled First Book of the Truth-sayer.
I didn’t deliberately plant this incident at the mid-point, but I knew the story needed this revelation for Yari’s character arc to work. During the drafting process, I wrote the fortune-teller scene late on. In the edit, it appeared both earlier and later in the plot. Somehow it landed dead centre of the plot; the midpoint of Freytag’s pyramid. Which is where it belongs; a revelation that shapes the second half of Yari’s story. Her ‘super-power’ leads her down a dangerous path to the third act finale.
Luck, judgement or some feel for story? That’s how writing goes sometimes.