The climax of a story is the turning point where the main conflict is decided: the protagonist faces the opposing force head-on, makes the choice that matters most, and something happens that can't be undone. It is usually the moment of highest tension and comes near the end, with the falling action and the resolution following from it. If the inciting incident asks the story's question, the climax answers it.
The quickest test is what happens after it: once the climax is over, the story can't go back. That is why the climax is not always the loudest scene. A battle can decide nothing, and a quiet refusal can decide everything. Nor is it the resolution. The climax decides the conflict; the falling action and the resolution after it show what the decision left behind.
What makes a climax
The most exciting scene and the climax are usually the same scene, but excitement is not what defines it. A climax passes three tests:
- It decides the central question. The inciting incident opened a question: will Hamlet avenge his father, will Elizabeth marry for love? The climax closes it. A thrilling scene that answers some other question is a set piece, not the climax.
- The protagonist decides it. Luck, a rescue or another character can help, but in most stories the decisive act is the protagonist's own. When someone else settles it, readers tend to feel cheated.
- It can't be undone. After the climax the situation has changed for good: someone is dead, a secret is out, a promise is refused.
Many writing teachers split the moment in two. Shawn Coyne's Story Grid calls the dilemma the crisis: in the Story Grid site's words, “a real choice between incompatible options with meaningful stakes,” either the best of two bad options or two goods that can't both be had. The climax is the action the character takes in answer. Separating them is useful in revision: if a climax feels hollow, the crisis before it often offered no real choice.
Tragedy adds two terms from Aristotle's Poetics: the reversal, when the action turns into its opposite, and the recognition, a change from ignorance to knowledge. Aristotle thought the finest recognition arrives together with a reversal, as it does in Oedipus. Both are covered in the guide to the tragic hero.
The word itself comes from the Greek klimax, a ladder. English borrowed it in the 1580s as a term of rhetoric for a series of statements rising in force, and by the late eighteenth century it meant the highest point of anything. In a story it is the top rung: every scene before it climbs toward it, and nothing after it climbs higher.
Climax examples from literature
The point envenom'd too! Then, venom, to thy work.
The duel with Laertes is a trap, and it springs on everyone. Gertrude drinks the poisoned wine, Laertes is cut with his own poisoned blade and confesses, “The King, the King's to blame,” and Hamlet finally kills Claudius. The question the Ghost raised in Act 1 is answered at last. What changed is Hamlet: just before the duel he tells Horatio “The readiness is all,” and for the first time he stops planning and acts when the moment comes.
I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.
Lady Catherine de Bourgh drives to Longbourn to make Elizabeth promise never to accept Mr. Darcy. Elizabeth answers, “I will make no promise of the kind.” Nobody draws a sword, but something changes that can't be taken back. Elizabeth has refused, to the face of Darcy's own aunt, to rule him out, and Lady Catherine carries the refusal straight to Darcy. “It taught me to hope,” he tells Elizabeth in Chapter 58, because had she been “absolutely, irrevocably decided against” him, she would have said so. The verdict of his first proposal is reversed, and the second proposal follows. Some readers place the climax at that proposal instead. Either way, it is decided by a choice.
I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!
The police seem satisfied and sit chatting with him. The only pressure on the narrator is the heartbeat he hears under the floor, and it grows until he confesses. An internal conflict can produce a climax as loud as any fight. Poe also stops right there: the confession is the last line, with no falling action at all.
They're too nice to use just at present.
Della has sold her hair to buy a chain for Jim's watch, and Jim has sold his watch to buy combs for her hair. The climax is the exchange of presents, and it reverses the story's meaning: the gifts are useless, and the sacrifices behind them are the point. A quiet climax still needs everything before it to have been building toward it.
A young man the king has caught courting his daughter must open one of two doors. Behind one is a tiger, behind the other a lady he would have to marry. The princess knows which is which and signals the door on the right. He opens it, and Stockton stops, asking the reader to decide what came out. The decisive moment is on the page. Only its result is missing, and that is the point.
Films show the same tests at work. In Star Wars (1977), Luke Skywalker switches off his targeting computer on the final run, a decision and an action in one. In Jaws (1975), Brody, alone on the sinking boat, fires at the air tank in the shark's jaws. In The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Clarice Starling faces the killer in a pitch-dark basement, by herself.
Types of climax
| Type | What decides it | Example |
|---|---|---|
| TypeConfrontation | What decides itA fight, a duel, a chase or a trial | ExampleHamlet's duel with Laertes |
| TypeDecision | What decides itA choice that shows who the character is | ExampleElizabeth refusing Lady Catherine |
| TypeRevelation | What decides itA truth comes out and changes everything | ExampleOedipus Rex, Sophocles (c. 429 BC) |
| TypeConfession | What decides itA character gives themselves away | Example“The Tell-Tale Heart” |
| TypeReversal | What decides itThe outcome turns the story's meaning around | Example“The Gift of the Magi” |
| TypeOpen | What decides itThe decisive moment is shown and its result withheld | Example“The Lady, or the Tiger?” |
Stories with a strong inner conflict often have two climaxes, an outer one and an inner one. They often land hardest in the same scene, when one action settles both. If they have to be separate, many writers put them close together, inner first, so the outer climax can show the change.
An anticlimax is a build-up that ends in something small. Done on purpose, it is a comic or ironic effect, the grand procession that ends in a slipped banana peel. Done by accident, it is a structural flaw: chapters of rising stakes settled by a phone call.
Where the climax goes
Late. The usual structures put it in the last fifth of a novel or a film, and a short story often saves it for the final page.
| Model | Where the climax falls |
|---|---|
| ModelThree-act structure | Where the climax fallsAbout 85 to 90 percent of the way through |
| ModelSave the Cat beat sheet | Where the climax fallsIn the Finale, 80 to 99 percent |
| ModelFreytag's pyramid (1863) | Where the climax fallsThe middle of a five-act tragedy |
| ModelShort story | Where the climax fallsOften the last page, sometimes the last line |
Freytag's middle is the odd one out because his third act was the turn and the last two acts were the fall; the full comparison is in the guide to plot structure. After the climax comes the falling action, and in most novels it is short.
How to write a climax
- Write the question down
One line: the question the inciting incident raised. Then check that your climax answers that question, not a related one. A heist novel that ends on the thief's reconciliation with her father has answered the wrong question, unless the heist was always about him.
On a finished draft, attach the opening chapters and the climax chapter and ask the Strokes Assistant what question the opening raises and whether the climax answers that one or a different one.
- Take the help away
Separate the protagonist from mentors and allies. The decisive act usually needs to be theirs, so engineer a situation where nobody else can do it for them.
- Build a real crisis
Give the protagonist two options that both cost something. If one choice is obviously right, the climax is likely to feel like a formality.
- Pay off the setups
Use what the reader already knows: the skill practiced in Chapter 3, the object on the mantelpiece, the lie told in the first act. This is Chekhov's gun at its most important, and the guide to foreshadowing shows how to plant the setups without giving the ending away.
- Slow down at the decisive beat
Write the build-up fast and the one moment that decides everything slowly, beat by beat, with the character's senses and thoughts. The guide to pacing has the techniques.
- Make it cost
Even a victory should leave a mark: a wound, a friendship ended, a belief given up. The cost is what the falling action and the resolution will show.
Common climax mistakes
A climax that lands
- The protagonist makes the decisive choice and acts on it.
- It answers the question the opening raised.
- It uses skills, objects and facts set up earlier.
- It costs something that can't be got back.
- It happens on the page, in a scene.
A climax that fizzles
- Luck, the police or a stranger settles it.
- It answers a different question from the one the book asked.
- It depends on a power or a fact the reader has never seen.
- Nobody pays for anything.
- It is reported afterward, or explained in a villain's speech.
Two quieter problems turn up in revision. A climax that arrives too early, with a quarter of the book still to go, leaves a long falling action with nothing to hold the reader. A string of false climaxes, each scene bigger than the last but none decisive, wears readers out before the real one.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between the climax and the resolution?
They come in order: climax, falling action, resolution. The climax is the scene of highest tension where the outcome is decided. The falling action plays out its immediate consequences, and the resolution, or denouement, ties off the remaining threads once the outcome can no longer change. A quick test: if a scene could still change who won or what it cost, the resolution hasn't started yet.
What is an anticlimax?
An anticlimax is a build-up that ends in something trivial or disappointing. Used on purpose, it is a comic or ironic effect, a grand promise followed by a small result. By accident, it is usually a climax that fails one of the three tests: rising stakes settled by luck, a phone call or an offstage event, so the reader feels cheated of the confrontation the story promised.
Can a story have two climaxes?
A story has one main climax, but stories with strong subplots or inner conflicts often have more than one decisive moment: an outer climax for the plot and an inner one for the character, or a climax for each storyline. They land hardest when one scene resolves both. Separate climaxes work best close together, near the end.
