Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice.
Exposition
Guess Who’s Back (Hint: It’s Not Slim Shady)
Think of this as the first shot of a movie: a man gets off of a train. He seems to be our protagonist (that’s a fancy word for main character). Is this a place that he has been to before? Yes, but now things are different. He must have been gone for a while. See, exposition is basically a way of giving the reader enough information to get the situation, and we get all of this information in the first paragraph of the story.
Rising Action
Gone Fishing (Something’s Not Right)
Alright, so what’s our protagonist doing in this place? Oh, he’s taking a nice little fishing trip. But it becomes clear pretty quickly that he’s not on vacation. He seems to be escaping something. And he also seems to be a little bit emotionally fragile, and a little too preoccupied with things like how heavy his pack is. Yup, something is definitely fishy.
Climax
That’s One Big Fish
After seeing our protagonist go through a series of actions that reinforce what we initially suspected about something being not quite right, he does what he came to do: fish. This is the real test, and there is a moment where it seems like the emotional barrier that Nick has been so careful about maintaining might just crack. This is right after he loses the really big trout, which was literally (and metaphorically) just too much for him.
Falling Action
Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew
But our protagonist makes it through without breaking down. He catches two good fish, and he decides that it’s been a good day. Hey, Nick knows his limits, and as a result we feel safe—or at least, we feel that he’s safe.
Resolution
“Plenty of Days Coming”
Another crisis momentarily arises when Nick considers the swamp and the tragedy of fishing there, but he decides that the swamp is a challenge for another day. It’s a tidy resolution: things aren’t completely fixed and perfect, but Nick has come to terms with that and is positive that things will get better.