In 1863, the German playwright and novelist Gustav Freytag analysed a large body of classical and Shakespearean drama and proposed that a striking number of them share the same underlying shape, when plotted as a kind of dramatic pressure over time: rising action building steadily toward a climax, followed by falling action resolving toward an ending. That shape, now usually called Freytag's Pyramid, still gets taught as a foundational model of how narrative tension builds and releases.
Five stages, one recurring arc
Freytag's model breaks a typical dramatic structure into five parts: exposition, which establishes the world and characters; rising action, a series of escalating complications and conflicts; the climax, the story's turning point and point of maximum tension; falling action, where consequences of the climax play out; and resolution, sometimes called denouement, where the remaining tension resolves. Plotted as a line, tension rises steadily through the first half, peaks at the climax, and descends through the second half — the "pyramid" shape that gives the model its name.
Why the shape keeps reappearing outside the plays it was built from
Freytag developed the model specifically from five-act classical and Shakespearean drama, but later writers, editors, and screenwriters have applied versions of the same rising-climax-falling shape to an enormous range of narrative forms well outside its original context — novels, films, video games, even individual scenes within a larger work — suggesting the underlying pattern of building and releasing tension may reflect something more general about how audiences engage with unresolved conflict, not just a convention specific to nineteenth-century German analysis of classical theatre.
What we're still unsure about
Freytag's Pyramid has drawn real, ongoing pushback from writers and narrative theorists who argue it flattens genuinely different kinds of story shapes into one template. Many acclaimed novels and films use structures that resist a single climax and tidy resolution, including narratives built around multiple parallel climaxes, deliberately unresolved or ambiguous endings, or non-linear timelines the model doesn't map onto cleanly at all. Whether Freytag's shape describes something close to a universal feature of how tension-driven narrative works, or is better understood as one useful template among several genuinely different structural traditions, remains debated among literary theorists rather than settled.
This sits inside Narrative Structure & Plot Architecture, one of seven topics in Fiction, one of five domains in Literature, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.