importance. Its only function would be to destroy the importance of the climax.
Never resolve a smaller issue after the climax. In a story with multiple threads, the problems of the lesser characters, if not involved in the climax, have to be solved before the climax. An example is the subplot of Irina and Sasha in We the Living. It would have been a bad anticlimax had I shown their fate—their being sent to Siberia and their parting—after I had shown Kira shot on the border. Or, in The Fountainhead, the romance of Keating and Katie was important throughout the story, and some conclusion to it had to be reached. But it would have been improper to show their last meeting after Dominique’s ride to Roark at the top of the Wynand building.
It is important, however, that every conflict be resolved before the story ends. An annoying aspect of badly constructed novels is that the author often poses minor problems and then leaves them hanging in the air, as if he has forgotten all about them. (Of course, in really bad novels, even the major issues are not resolved.) In this regard, Chekhov had a good rule, which applies just as much to novels as to plays: “Never hang a gun on the wall in the first act if you don’t intend to have it go off in the third.” This applies to everything in a plot structure. (The breach of this rule is called a “red herring.”)
When you construct a plot, the first event to figure out is always the climax. Suppose you have an idea for the theme and subject of a story but have not yet invented the climax. Then do not start to outline the story from the beginning. If you set up a lot of interesting conflicts and seemingly connected events without knowing where you are going, and then attempt to devise a climax that resolves it all, the process will be an excruciating mental torture (and you will not succeed). Therefore, in planning your story, get to your climax as quickly as possible. First devise an event that dramatizes and resolves the issues of your story, then construct the rest of the plot backward, by asking yourself what events are needed in order to bring your characters to this point.
This is a good example of the process of final causation. In order to judge what incidents to include in your story, you have to know your purpose in the story—i.e., your climax. Only when you know this can you begin to analyze which steps, each serving as the efficient cause of the next, will lead your characters logically to this decisive event.
There is no rule about what element has to be the first germ of a story in your mind. Fortunate writers are sometimes able to devise the climax first; in other words, they get a dramatic idea that constitutes the climax of a story, then work backward to construct the plot (which is sheer pleasure). This is a matter of pure accident. What kind of story you will tell is not an accident; it depends on your premises. But whether you first think of a character and then add the other elements, or of an abstract theme, or of a conflict situation—that is accidental. You are free to start at any point, because no matter where you start, you have to complete the circle and include all the other elements.
The only rule is that you have to know your climax (in dramatized terms) before you start to outline the steps by which to arrive there.
It has been said that Broadway is full of first acts. Many people can come up with an intriguing first act but do not know what to do with the play thereafter. By contrast, a good dramatist starts with the third act. He does not necessarily write the third act, or the climax, first—but he keeps it in mind.
I once asked a woman writer of lending-library fiction about her method of writing, and she answered airily: “Oh, I throw a bunch of characters up in the air and let them come down.” Her stories read like it. This is a horrible example of what not to do.
In the same school are those modern writers who start with some assignment such as “a mood of adolescence” or “my search for the meaning of life in prep school.” When they write, the standard of selection is the mood of the moment. The