Hey guys! So it seems like Sundays are turning out to be my days of blog post writing. I am still trying really hard to get them up on Friday but October and early November suck for writing things. That middle of the semester is filled with so many projects and assignments. Hopefully I’m a little bit better next week. If it keeps going on like this I might just change my posting day to Sunday, but we’ll see. Anyway, onto the next post in the series:
Secrets of Plot: Resolution: The Solution
Rising Action
So here we are at the final two posts in this series. Finally, the Resolution! The Resolution, as it says in the title of this post, should be the solution to the problem that was introduced during the conflict. The resolution can be broken up into two parts in my opinion. The first part of the resolution is called the Falling Action and the other part is called the conclusion. This post is going to be focused on the Falling Action and next week’s final post will focus on the Conclusion and be the conclusion to this series.
As we talk about Falling Action we first need to understand what Falling Action does in a story. Have you ever read a book where the climax occurs and then two or three pages later the story ends, and the ending seems like it almost wrapped up too quickly? There are some lose ends that you didn’t really notice during the climax that after finishing it the book you are really confused about. What happened to George from just before the climax? Did he die in the final battle? Did Character X and Character Y get married? The Falling Action is where the author addresses these topics. If an author doesn’t have any Falling Action, then these are the questions that your readers are going to have. The Falling Action is where everything in your story starts to get tied up. For those crafty writers out there, the Falling Action is where all the loose ends of the masterful blanket that is your story get tied in. If the ending of the book needs to lead into another book, then you leave a few loose threads to tie into in the next book. Leave enough but don’t leave too many.
The Falling Action is the part of the story where the character discovers that everything is going to be alright. Sometimes if we are talking about an arcing plot that fills several books than sometimes the last half of the last book in a series will be the Falling Action. In my book series, the whole fifth book is Falling Action.
But that doesn’t mean that your Falling Action scenes are boring. They aren’t all about the villains saying sorry or the side characters finding life fulfillment. It is still action. It’s not called the Falling Clamness. It’s called the Falling Action. It simply means that you aren’t creating more conflict for your characters as the story begins to wind down towards its end. But that doesn’t mean it’s boring. My fifth book still has just as many battle scenes, a runaway train, explosive materials and death matches as the other books. It just means that I haven’t introduced new conflict. Just more solutions for the existing conflicts.
That is what good Falling Action should do. But Falling Action is not the conclusion. The conclusion is later. We find the conclusion at the very very end of the book and that’s what I’m going to talk about next week.
So that’s all I’ve got! I hope that wasn’t too boring for you guys! Hopefully we will be on time with next weeks post. And at the end of next week’s post I’m going to be telling all of you guys what the next series is going to be about. So stick around for that! So, as always,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!