Freytag's Pyramid, From the Source

Freytag's Pyramid is the five-part shape of a tragedy that Gustav Freytag drew in The Technique of the Drama (1863): introduction, rise, climax, return or fall, and catastrophe. The action rises to a climax in the middle of the play and falls away from it to the end. Between the parts sit three moments: the exciting force, the tragic force and the moment of last suspense.

Freytag was a German novelist and playwright, and he built the pyramid from Sophocles, Shakespeare and the German stage of Lessing, Goethe and Schiller. Every quote below is from the authorised English translation by Elias J. MacEwan, made from the sixth German edition (archive.org).

What Are the Five Parts of Freytag's Pyramid?

Freytag introduces the shape himself: "the drama possesses (if one may symbolize its arrangement by lines) a pyramidal structure. It rises from the introduction with the entrance of the exciting forces to the climax, and falls from here to the catastrophe." His five parts, in his order:

"Each of these five parts may consist of a single scene, or a succession of connected scenes," he writes, "but the climax is usually composed of one chief scene" (pp. 114–115). The rise is usually the longest of the five, and our guide to rising action covers what goes into it and how long it runs.

What Are the Three Moments?

Freytag puts "three important scenic effects" between the parts, "through which the parts are separated as well as bound together." He calls them crises:

• The exciting force stands between the introduction and the rise, and marks "the beginning of the stirring action."
• The tragic force stands between the climax and the return: "the beginning of the counter-action."
• The moment of last suspense stands between the return and the catastrophe. It gives the audience "a distant possibility of a happy release" just before the end: Friar Laurence might still arrive before Romeo kills himself, and Macbeth is still safe from any man born of woman as Birnam Wood approaches (pp. 136–137).

Only the first is required. "The operation of the first is necessary to every play; the second and third are good but not indispensable accessories" (p. 115). Most craft books now call that first moment the inciting incident.

Where Is the Climax in Freytag's Pyramid?

In the middle. This is the part most summaries get wrong. Freytag says the two halves of a drama "are firmly united by a point of the action which lies directly in the middle. This middle, the climax of the play, is the most important place of the structure; the action rises to this; the action falls away from this" (p. 105).

His climax isn't the final showdown. It is the hero's height, the point after which things turn against them. In a five-act play it usually falls in Act Three (p. 195). When the climax and the tragic force come close together, he adds, the middle grows wide enough to change "the pyramidal form into one with a double apex" (p. 133).

How Does Freytag Read Romeo and Juliet?

Freytag applies the pyramid to Shakespeare's plays himself, and Romeo and Juliet is one he works through in detail (pp. 122–127):

• Exciting force: two scenes side by side. Romeo resolves to go to the Capulets' masked ball, and Paris and Capulet have the conversation that, Freytag says, "determines the fate of Juliet."
• Rise: four stages: the masked ball, the garden scene, the marriage, and the fight in which Tybalt dies.
• Climax: the group of scenes from Juliet's "Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds" to Romeo's "It were a grief, so brief to part with thee; farewell," the night after Tybalt's death.
• Last suspense: Friar Laurence may still reach the tomb in time.
• Catastrophe: the deaths in the tomb.

Freytag's Pyramid vs the Three-Act Structure

The biggest difference is where the climax sits. Freytag's is in the middle. The three-act structure novelists use today, from Syd Field's Screenplay (1979), saves the big finish for the third act, and Jessica Brody's Save the Cat! Writes a Novel gives the Finale the last 20% of the book. The middle of a three-act story is the Midpoint, which Field added in The Screenwriter's Workbook (1984). That is roughly where Freytag's climax falls.

They are less far apart than they look. Freytag wrote that the five parts "will bear contracting into a smaller number of acts": "the beginning of the struggle, the climax, and the catastrophe, must always be in strong contrast; the action allows then of division into three acts" (p. 196). For the three-act version in full, see the three-act structure.

Does Freytag's Pyramid Work for Novels?

It works best for the kind of story it was built from: one where the hero rises, overreaches and falls. Freytag was writing about tragedy, and he is firm about it: the catastrophe is where the hero is destroyed, and he warns the poet not to be "misled by modern tender-heartedness, to spare the life of his hero" (p. 137). A novel that ends in triumph fits the pyramid less well, because its height comes at the end. The pyramid is one story arc among several, and the others, from rags to riches to Cinderella, put their peaks in different places.

Two more cautions:

• The words in school diagrams aren't all his. Freytag says introduction, not exposition, and catastrophe, not resolution or denouement. "Rising action" and "falling action" are in the translation; exposition, resolution and denouement aren't his names for any part. The word denouement is French for an "untying", and English writers were using it a century before Freytag.
• Exposition isn't only a stage. The playwright Lajos Egri argued in The Art of Dramatic Writing (1946) that exposition shouldn't be confined to the opening: "'Exposition' itself is part of the whole play, and not simply a fixture to be used at the beginning and then discarded."

How Do You Outline Freytag's Pyramid in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app, and its Outliner board holds a five-part outline as folders you can fill with scenes.

1. Open the Outliner on the Draft and add five folders with Add › Folder: Introduction, Rise, Climax, Return, Catastrophe.
2. In each folder's synopsis, write what that part does in your story.
3. Check the middle. The Climax folder should be the hero's height, with the fall still ahead of them.
4. Open each folder and add its scenes with Add › Scene. Make the first scene of Rise the exciting force, and put the tragic force and the moment of last suspense inside Return.
5. Mark the three moments. Open one, make a label called "Crisis" (the pencil beside Status in the Inspector's Properties opens Edit labels & statuses), and set it on all three.
6. Switch the Outliner to its list to see where the three moments fall in the whole book.

The Outliner is also where you move scenes between parts as the draft changes the plan.

Common Mistakes

• Putting the climax near the end. Freytag puts it "directly in the middle."
• Calling the last part the resolution. Freytag's word is catastrophe. He was describing tragedy, and the hero falls.
• Forgetting the three moments. The exciting force is the one Freytag says every play needs.
• Treating the return as filler. Freytag calls it "the most difficult part of the drama," because the climax has already happened and new suspense has to be built (p. 133).
• Calling it a template for every story. It was drawn from tragedy, and Freytag himself shows it varying from play to play.

Sources

Retrieved 19 October 2026.

• Gustav Freytag, Freytag's Technique of the Drama, tr. Elias J. MacEwan from the sixth German edition (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1894; third edition, Scott, Foresman, 1900). Page numbers above are from this edition.
• Gustav Freytag, Die Technik des Dramas (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1863), the first edition.
• Lajos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946).
• Syd Field, Screenplay (1979) and The Screenwriter's Workbook (1984), via the three-act structure.
• Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel (2018), via the Save the Cat beat sheet.