Rising action is the part of a story between the inciting incident and the climax, where complications pile up and the conflict grows until it can't go any higher. Dictionary.com defines it as "a related series of incidents in a literary plot that build toward the point of greatest interest."
It is the second of the five parts taught in schools: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. In most stories it is also the longest. Everything the climax pays off is set up and made worse here.
What Is Rising Action in a Story?
Rising action is the stretch of a plot where the main character pursues a goal against growing opposition. It starts when something disturbs the character's life, the inciting incident, and ends at the climax, where the conflict comes to a head.
The idea is old. Aristotle split every tragedy into two parts in the Poetics: "Complication and Unravelling or Denouement." His complication covers "all that extends from the beginning of the action to the part which marks the turning-point to good or bad fortune." That takes in what we now call the exposition and the rising action together.
The five-part model the term belongs to comes from Gustav Freytag's The Technique of the Drama (1863). His English translator calls this part "the rise" and "the rising movement", and uses "the rising action" throughout Freytag's analyses of plays. In the five-part shape now called Freytag's Pyramid, it is the climb from the exciting force to the climax.
Freytag opens his section on it with three things that are already true when it begins: "The action has been started; the chief persons have shown what they are; the interest has been awakened."
What Happens in the Rising Action?
Rising action does four jobs. Each one makes the climax harder for the character and more necessary for the reader.
| Job | What it means on the page |
|---|---|
| Complicate | Each attempt at the goal runs into a new obstacle |
| Escalate | The stakes and the difficulty rise from one complication to the next |
| Bring in the opposition | The antagonist and the forces against the hero take their place |
| Close the doors | Each step makes going back harder, until only the climax is left |
Complications. In Story (1997), the screenwriting teacher Robert McKee names the stretch between the inciting incident and the crisis "progressive complications". "To complicate progressively," he writes, "means to generate more and more conflict" as the characters meet ever stronger opposition. The word that matters is progressive. Three obstacles of the same size are repetition, not rising action.
Escalation. Freytag puts it as a law of the whole play: "the poet must continually heighten his effects from the beginning to the end of his play" (p. 79). In the rising action, he says, the hero's "inner commotion, the passionate eagerness, the desire" increase, and "new circumstances, stimulating or restraining, intensify his embarrassment and his struggle" (p. 106).
The opposition. Freytag's practical rule is that the rising action is where the counter-players arrive. If the main opponents haven't yet been given a place, "a place must be made for them now" (p. 125). It is also a good place to start subplots, so they have time to resolve before the end.
Stages. Freytag builds the rise in steps: "Whether the ascent is made by one or several stages to the climax, depends on material and treatment" (p. 125). Each stage is a group of scenes with its own small peak.
One thing should be finished by the end of it. John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction (1984), says that "by the time we reach the peak of the Fichtean curve there should be no more exposition to be presented." Explanation belongs in the climb, not at the top.
The rising action doesn't have to rise for the hero. Freytag describes two kinds of play. In one, the hero drives the action upward. In the other (Othello, King Lear), the main characters "do not give direction in the ascending action, but are themselves directed" (p. 107). What rises is the tension, not the hero's fortunes.
What Is a Try-Fail Cycle?
A try-fail cycle is the unit most rising action is built from: the character tries to reach the goal, fails or half-succeeds, and things get worse. Then they try again, from a worse position.
The best-known version is from the Writing Excuses podcast (episode 10.29, July 2015). Brandon Sanderson breaks the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark into "yes-but" and "no-and" results: "Yes, he gets across the pit, but spiders are all over him." And at the end of the run: "Does he defeat them? No, and they take his idol."
- Yes, but. The character gets what they wanted, with a new problem attached.
- No, and. The character fails, and something else goes wrong as well.
Both push the story forward. A plain "no" stalls it, and a plain "yes" ends the conflict too early. The same pattern sits inside each scene of Dwight Swain's scene and sequel, where every scene ends in a disaster that leads to the next goal.
Mary Robinette Kowal's rule for the exercise in that episode is the whole idea in one line: "each time they try, that thing needs to get worse."
How Long Is the Rising Action?
It depends on where the climax falls. There is no fixed rule, so we measured three classics in their Project Gutenberg texts, using Freytag's own division of the two plays. The counts are ours, rounded, and include speech headings and stage directions.
| Work | Rising action counted | Words | Share of the whole | Ends at |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Romeo and Juliet | Act I scene 3 to the end of Act III scene 1 (Tybalt's death) | about 10,500 | about 41% | 52% |
| Hamlet | Act II scene 1 to the end of Act III scene 2 (the play scene) | about 10,800 | about 34% | 56% |
| A Christmas Carol (1843) | Stave II to Scrooge's promise at his grave, end of Stave IV | about 19,600 | about 69% | 92% |
In both tragedies the rising action ends just past the middle, exactly where Freytag put the climax. In Dickens, as in most novels today, the climax comes near the end, so the rising action takes up more than two-thirds of the book.
For a novel built on the three-act structure, that means the rising action runs from the inciting incident in Act One, through the whole of Act Two, to the climax in Act Three. That is most of the book, and it is why the middle is where novels most often sag.
What Are Some Examples of Rising Action?
Romeo and Juliet. Freytag maps the rise in four stages (pp. 126–127): the masked ball, the garden scene, the marriage, and the street fight in which Tybalt dies. Each stage binds the lovers closer and puts them in more danger. The climax follows straight after, beginning with Juliet's "Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds".
Hamlet. Again four stages (pp. 190–191). Polonius decides Hamlet is mad for love of Ophelia. Hamlet plans to test the king with a play. The king and his spies test Hamlet in turn, and the king grows suspicious. The play is performed and confirms Hamlet's suspicion. The climax is the king at prayer, with Hamlet hesitating over him.
Julius Caesar. Freytag's example of the shortest kind: "the ascent, from the moment of excitation to the climax, consists of only one stage, the conspiracy" (p. 126). It leads straight into the murder, the climax.
A Christmas Carol. Three spirits, three stages, each harder on Scrooge than the last. The first shows him what he lost, the second what he is doing to others now, and the third his own unmourned death. It ends at his grave, where he begs for a second chance.
Rising Action vs Falling Action
| Rising action | Falling action | |
|---|---|---|
| Where | Between the inciting incident and the climax | Between the climax and the resolution |
| Direction | Tension builds | Tension releases |
| What happens | Complications, escalation, try-fail cycles | Consequences of the climax play out |
| Length in a novel | Usually most of the book | Usually a chapter or two |
The falling action answers the questions the rising action raised. The denouement then settles the story into its new normal.
A Worked Example
Hattie Rowe keeps bees on a small farm. Three weeks before the county show, where a prize could save the farm, she finds two hives dead. Someone has poisoned them. That is the inciting incident. Here is a rising action built from try-fail cycles:
| Stage | She tries | Result | What it costs her |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Testing the water trough | Yes, but: the water is clean, and a third hive dies overnight | Time, and a hive |
| 2 | Asking her neighbour Dunn if he has been spraying | No, and: he denies it and reports her hives to the council as a nuisance | Her right to keep bees at all |
| 3 | Hiding a trail camera at the hives | Yes, but: it catches the poisoner, and it is her nephew Sam | Her trust in her family |
| 4 | Confronting Sam | No, and: he admits someone paid him, won't say who, and leaves. The show is tomorrow, with one hive left | Everything, at once |
Each stage is worse than the one before, and each widens what Hattie can lose: money, then the farm, then her family. By stage four there is no way back, and the climax has to come.
Compare a flat version. She tests the water and finds nothing. She asks Dunn, and he says no. She checks the camera, and it shows a stranger. Every scene produces a clue, but nothing gets worse and nothing new is at risk. The plot moves, but the action doesn't rise.
How Do You Check Your Rising Action in Deckle?
Deckle is a novel-writing app for Windows, macOS and Linux. Its Outliner can show the book as a list with your own columns beside each scene, so you can see whether the stakes climb from one complication to the next.
- Click Outliner in the menu bar. Your chapters and scenes appear as cards, each with a synopsis. In each scene's synopsis, write what the character tries and what goes wrong.
- Click Grid View to switch to List View. Every chapter and scene is a row with its Synopsis and Words.
- Click the + at the end of the list's header row (Add custom column). In Add Field, type "Stakes" as the Field name, choose Dropdown as the Field type, add the options "1" to "5", pressing Enter after each, and click Add Field.
- Add a second column the same way, called "Result", with the options "Yes, but", "No, and" and "Success".
- Set both from each scene's row, from the inciting incident to the climax. Read down the list. The Stakes should climb. A run of the same number, or a "Success" well before the climax, is where the rising action goes flat.
- For the shape of the whole book, click Writing Stats in the menu bar and choose the Manuscript tab. Words per chapter shows every chapter as a bar in reading order. Hover a bar for its name and word count, and check how much of the book comes before your climax chapter.
When a flat stretch shows up, the fixes for a sagging middle apply: cut the scene that repeats, add a turn, or make the next failure cost more.
What Do Popular Explanations Get Wrong?
- "Freytag said all plots have five stages." He didn't. Freytag wrote about drama, and above all tragedy. His examples are Sophocles, Shakespeare, Lessing, Goethe and Schiller.
- "Romeo meeting Juliet is the inciting incident." Not in Freytag's own reading. His exciting force comes earlier: Romeo's decision to go to the Capulets' ball, beside the conversation in which Paris asks for Juliet. The meeting at the ball is the first stage of the rising action.
- "Tybalt's death is the climax." For Freytag it is the last stage of the rise, "the strong break which separates the aggregate rise from the climax" (p. 127). The climax is the group of scenes that follows.
- "Sanderson invented try-fail cycles." He popularised them, but on Writing Excuses he credits the idea to the writing class Dave Wolverton taught, which he and Dan Wells took in college. Wolverton, he says, would have someone "fail three times before they succeed."
Common Mistakes
- Complications of the same size. If the third obstacle is no harder than the first, the story is circling, not rising.
- Failures that cost nothing. A setback the character can walk away from doesn't raise the stakes. Each one should close a door.
- Easy wins in the middle. A clean success ends the tension. Use a "yes, but" instead.
- Treating three cycles as a rule. On the same episode, Dan Wells counts nine try-fail cycles in Inigo Montoya's revenge plot in The Princess Bride. Kowal's measure is that the number of cycles should match how important the problem is to the character.
- Exposition at the peak. Gardner's rule: by the top of the climb, the explaining should be done.
- An opponent who arrives too late. If the antagonist first appears at the climax, the rising action had nothing to rise against.
FAQ
What is rising action in simple terms?
It is the part of a story where things get harder. It starts after the event that sets the story going and ends at the climax.
What comes before and after the rising action?
The exposition and the inciting incident come before it. The climax comes after it, followed by the falling action and the resolution.
Is the rising action the longest part of a story?
Usually. In A Christmas Carol it is about two-thirds of the book by our count. In Shakespeare's tragedies, where the climax sits in the middle, it is closer to a third.
Does the inciting incident belong to the rising action?
It is the trigger, and the rising action begins with it. Freytag puts his exciting force at the boundary between the introduction and the rise.
Is the climax part of the rising action?
No. The rising action leads up to the climax and ends where it begins. The climax is the turning point the whole climb has been building towards.
Can a story have more than one rising action?
Each subplot has its own, and a long novel can have several rises with smaller peaks. Freytag's own rises come in stages, each with a peak of its own.
What is the difference between rising action and conflict?
Conflict is the struggle itself. Rising action is the part of the plot where that conflict builds, complication by complication.
Sources
Retrieved 1 November 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), pp. 79, 106–107, 125–127, 190–191. Page numbers above are from this edition.
- Aristotle, Poetics, tr. S. H. Butcher, section XVIII.
- Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (ReganBooks, 1997), chapter 9, "Act Design" (archive.org).
- John Gardner, The Art of Fiction (Knopf, 1984), pp. 187–188 (archive.org).
- Writing Excuses, 10.29: Why Should My Characters Fail Spectacularly?, 19 July 2015.
- Dictionary.com, "rising action".
- Word counts: our own, from the Project Gutenberg texts of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and A Christmas Carol.