Identifying the Elements of A Plot Diagram

Identifying the Elements of A Plot Diagram

Plot Diagram 3 4 2 1 5

Plot (definition) • Plot is the organized pattern or sequence of events that make up a story. Every plot is made up of a series of incidents that are related to one another.

1. Exposition • This usually occurs at the beginning of a story. Here the characters are introduced. We also learn about the setting of the story. • The exposition contains background information a reader must understand in order to know what is going on in the story.

Exposition Example • There once was a kingdom without a king, an ugly queen sat staring, disconsolately out from the high tower at the fair lands that she ruled alone. On a distant hill and unseen by the queen, a young shepherd by the name of Barnard gazed back at the castle and thought deep thoughts.

2. Rising Action • This part of the story begins to develop the conflict(s). A building of interest or suspense occurs.

Rising Action Example “May be you don't," Smiley says. "May be you understand frogs, and may be you don't understand 'em; may be you've had experience, and may be you an't only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I've got my opinion, and I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county." And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, "Well, I'm only a stranger here, and I an't got no frog; but if I had a frog, I'd bet you." And then Smiley says, "That's all right that's all right if you'll hold my box a minute, I'll go and get you a frog." And so the feller took the box, and put up his forty dollars along with Smiley's, and set down to wait.

3. Climax • This is the turning point of the story. Usually the main character comes face to face with a conflict. The main character will change in some way. • The climax is the point of highest tension.

Climax Example The hair of the affrighted pedagogue rose upon his head with terror. What was to be done? To turn and fly was now too late; and besides, what chance was there of escaping ghost or goblin, if such it was, which could ride upon the wings of the wind? Summoning up, therefore, a show of courage, he demanded in stammering accents, "Who are you?" He received no reply. He repeated his demand in a still more agitated voice. Still there was no answer. Once more he cudgelled the sides of the inflexible Gunpowder, and, shutting his eyes, broke forth with involuntary fervor into a psalm tune.

4. Falling Action • Things begin to get back to normal. • Life goes on (even if the problem isn't solved).

Falling Action Example The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back, and the door opened. A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him the courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The streetlamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.

5. Resolution/Denouement • The story comes to a reasonable ending.

Resolution/Denouement Example The whole field was dug. The brothers put seeds in the field. They had good rains that year. There was a very good crop that year. They sold all the crop and got a lot of money. They were happy. They understood their father’s words only then. The box of gold was good crop. The good crop brought them gold. They lived together happily.

Plot Elements Climax Rising Action Falling Action Resolution/ Denouement Exposition

Example #1 Rainsford, reclining in a steamer chair, indolently puffed on his favorite brier. The sensuous drowsiness of the night was on him." It's so dark," he thought, "that I could sleep without closing my eyes; the night would be my eyelids--” An abrupt sound startled him. Off to the right he heard it, and his ears, expert in such matters, could not be mistaken. Again he heard the sound, and again. Somewhere, off in the blackness, someone had fired a gun three times.

Example #2 Leiningen lay on his bed, his body swathed from head to foot in bandages. With fomentations and salves, they had managed to stop the bleeding, and had dressed his many wounds. Now they thronged around him, one question in every face. Would he recover? "He won't die," said the old man who had bandaged him, "if he doesn't want to.''

Example #3 It was cold. Cold for this time of year anyway. Cold for Louisiana. The wind cut as it blew by. The heat so common to this place, the sticky wet heat and insect buzz that filled most of the year was gone; cold had come and taken its place. But the sky was still overcast. It usually was. The grey was constant.The boy was grey, too. He wore an olive green trenchcoat (an army cast-off like his boots) over funereal black, greasy hair obscuring his eyes. They must have been grey. He was narrow-shouldered and small, and walked like he was in a trance. I suppose he was. It was trance weather.

Example #4 A glooming peace this morning with it brings;The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished:For never was a story of more woeThan this of Juliet and her Romeo.

Example #5 He must go on into the blackness ahead, or he would drown. His head was swelling, his lungs cracking. A hundred and fifteen, a hundred and fifteen pounded through his head, and he feebly clutched at rocks in the dark, pulling himself forward, leaving the brief space of sunlit water behind. He felt he was dying. He was no longer quite conscious. He struggled on in the darkness between lapses into unconsciousness. An immense, swelling pain filled his head, and then the darkness cracked with an explosion of green light. His hands, groping forward, met nothing, and his feet, kicking back, propelled him out into the open sea.

Conflict

Conflict • Conflict is a struggle between opposing characters or opposing forces. Without conflict, there is no plot. Conflict creates the plot and drives the story from its beginning to its end. • Conflict is the problem or struggle in a story. • Conflict can be internal or external.

External Conflict • involves a struggle between a character and an outside force, such as another character, a force of nature, or society

Internal Conflict • a struggle that takes place within a character’s own mind, as he or she wrestles with difficult thoughts, feelings, or choices

Conflict • There are four general types of conflict in literature: • Person vs. Person (Character vs. Character) - the conflict of one person against another person. • Person vs. Technology (Character vs. Technology - a character has a problem with robots or machines.

Conflict • Person vs. Environment (Character vs. Force of Nature) - the conflict a person encounters with the forces of nature, and shows how insignificant one person can be when compared to the cosmic scheme of things. • Person vs. Self (Character vs. Self) - internal conflict. It is those conflicts an individual has with his conscience.

Conflict Practice The sun was hot when it came up late. There was no early-morning coolness, no relief. An early heat came with the first edge of the sun and by the time the sun was full up, he was cooking and looking for some relief. He tried hoeing with his left hand low, then his right hand, then leaning forward more, then less, but nothing helped. It was hot, getting hotter, and he straightened and spit and resettled the straw hat he had bought in Grafton. It had a piece of green plastic in the brim that looked cool but wasn't.

Conflict Practice

Conflict Practice There was a kind of bleeeeekkkk, hoarse and very loud, coming from directly behind me and accompanied by a crashing in the brush, and I turned, raising my rifle (about as useful as a BB gun in these circumstances but we use what we have), to see two glaring red eyes coming at me at what seemed like sixty or seventy miles an hour. . . . .At the first instant I didn't realize that it was a large bull moose. He's lost the previous year's antlers and hadn't grown new ones yet. I just saw brown. I saw big. I saw death coming at me, snorting and thundering. I think I may have thought of phantoms, wood spirits, wild monsters-I most certainly did not think of moose.

Conflict Practice And so Caesar entered my life. He became many things to us – friend, entertainer, horror show – but he was never, never boring and his life comes back now in a montage of memories. There was the Halloween when he greeted a little boy who came to the door in a werewolf costume. There was one moment, priceless, when the two eyed each other, hairy monster-mask to Great Dane muzzle, at exactly the same height. I’m not certain what the little boy expected but he didn’t quail – he leaned forward and growled. I’m not sure what Caesar had expected either but it certainly wasn’t an angry werewolf. He made a sound like a train in a tunnel and disappeared into a dark corner of the bedroom closet and would not come out until all the little people stopped coming and the doorbell quit ringing. And it might be noted that he had a remarkable memory. Every one of the seven years that he was with us, when the first trick-or-treater came to the door on Halloween, no matter the costume, Caesar went into the bedroom closet, pulled a housecoat over his eyes, and would not come out until it was over. He had great heart, but courage against monsters wasn’t in him.

Conflict Practice There was--this is important--no television. There were just two channels in the major cities on the East and West Coasts. Almost nobody in town had a set. A TV set at that time was a huge buzzing, hissing black-and-white monster that had the added benefit of being dangerous. The coating on the inside of the picture tube required no less than forty-two thousand volts to operate, an amount that could easily kill fifteen or twenty horses. When television finally did come to the small towns up in Minnesota many a cat was turned into something close to a six-hundred-watt lightbulb by sticking his nose back in the power supply area of a console television set, trying to investigate the little crackling sounds and blue glow that came out of the ventilation holes. On his twelfth birthday, my pal Wayne Halverson licked the end of his finger and stuck it near the ventilation panel on his family's new RCA set. (Even though there was no television station programming to watch for nearly two more years they used it for a conversation piece and a place to put their bowling trophies, but my grandmother said the Halversons had always put on airs ever since Dewey, who was Wayne's great-great-grandfather, was kicked in the head by a workhorse and found that he could do accounting.)Wayne never actually touched the top of the main rectifier tube and so didn't get the full jolt, which would have cooked him on the spot, but it arced over to his finger and a lesser charge, say enough to light two or three single-family dwellings for a week or so, slammed him back into the wall and left him unconscious for several minutes. He later claimed that the incident was what made him the only one in our group who could actually talk to girls.

Identifying the Elements of A Plot Diagram