Basic Vocabulary: Rising Action

Earlier, we talked about basic story structure. If you haven't read that yet, go back and do so now.

Rising action is the single largest component of the basic five-part story structure. Effectively managing rising action is a huge part of effective storytelling. In many ways, it is what separates wannabes from professional writers.

Rising action is a series of complications that stops the protagonist from getting what they want and / or need. It begins at a point known as the inciting incident and ends at the story climax. 

The inciting incident can be one single action or a series of events that culminate in the moment raising action begins. 

Rising action is a burning fuse connected to a stick of dynamite. The fuse burns out at the climax and the dynamite explodes. Rising action, then, is the process of watching the fuse burn with a growing sense of dread, knowing the inevitable is awaiting. 

That said, the purpose of rising action is to show the audience what the dynamite looks like.

During this period of rising action, all the building blocks for the climax are put in place. Even though we should have some idea what the protagonist wants / needs by the inciting incident, we truly learn what the protagonist wants and needs (sometimes wants and needs are opposing in and of themselves).

The rising action is also where we learn the wants and needs of the antagonist. 

An accountant who has an MBA from Wharton and comptroller position in a fortune 500 company is not going to have the same training process and skills of a street gang member. They come from and live in two different worlds. When confronted, the accountant won't immediately report top violence and the gang member won't rely on opening a two-way dialogue to defuse the situation—unless the reason and logic to make those choices believable are introduced into the story.  

Rising action is the meat of your story. This is where your conflict / tension / stress results in character development and story development. 

Does your accountant react to a mugging by gang members violently by attacking them and breaking bones? Perhaps this sets up a chain of events in which we learn that our accountant spent his teenage years in a gang. Perhaps he's spent his adult life running from the enemies he made, and this violent attack has exposed him. Perhaps his empowers no longer feel comfortable with him working at their company because of his newly-demonstrated propensity for violence. Out of a job, displaced from his apartment, he must rebuild his life yet again. Except now his old gang enemies have resurfaced and new enemies emerge in the form of police who don't trust him and aren't working to protect him. 

This is the rising action of our story. Each setback, each frustration leads to yet another setback. Nothing good can happen for our protagonist or, if somehow our protagonist does manage to build something good (and it must be built our earned, not easily given), that good thing must be taken away. 

Emotionally, the rising action is an ebb and flow of emotion. Positive, then negative. Rinse and repeat. Each reversal of emotional energy must be bigger than the one that came before it. 

Think of rising action as torture. You inflict pain upon your protagonist—physical, emotional, psychological— and then give them some form of relief before inflicting more pain. Like a damned soul in hell, each drop of water offers only momentary relief from an increasingly agonizing torment. So, too, do the positive emotional moments in your story. There is some small relief, but the overall trend of the story is worsening.

There's an old bit of writing wisdom that says good storytelling is putting your character up a tree, then throwing rocks at them until they fall out of the tree. 

Your inciting incident gets them up the tree. Your rising action are the rocks you throw. 

During this period of rising action, your story must build logical momentum. You can't afford to steal your story during rising action. Characters can never simply sit around and wait for something to happen. This is called rising action for a reason. Put your emphasis on the action. If your story ever stops our slows, the audience losses interest and it dies.

Never, EVER let this happen.

-The Illiterate Writer