Aligning Climaxes

My wife and I enjoy watching the original Mission Impossible television shows.  Unlike the movies, which are more action-oriented, the shows feature intricate heists enacted by skilled professionals with fantastic attention to detail – in general, if anyone is at serious risk of being shot, something has gone very wrong.  Many of the team’s heists are based on timing, with each part of the team needing to execute their portion of the plan at a specific time so that everything aligns properly.  A difference of minutes could cause the whole intricate plot to collapse.

Plotting a story is similar.  You need to align disparate elements of the story – plot arcs, character arcs, idea arcs – to come to a satisfying and integrated climax at roughly the same point.  Some authors try to make this alignment closer than others (Sanderson is famous for all of his climaxes happening at almost the same time), but readers expect a certain rhythm out of a narrative, and part of that is the expectation that stories conclude more or less together.  A problem I’ve been pondering, though, is that real timing doesn’t usually work that way.

Take Impressions as an example.  For this particular story, two major threads tie it together: Raven’s character arc, and the mystery around the titular magical phenomenon known as impressions.  Part of why I chose this as my first serious novel project (I’ve written a few novel drafts before, but I was less deliberate about those and had no real thought for their future as I wrote them) is the relative simplicity of the story, since it’s effectively a straightforward narrative of Raven as he learns more about impressions.  It might seem straightforward to make the climax of Raven’s character arc coincide with the climax of the impressions arc, but it turns out to be a difficult trick, at least for me, for the simple reason that, from my reading of history and my observations of the present, doing so feels like a conceit.

Stories are full of conceits.  I keep using that term, and one of these days I should more thoroughly explain what I mean by it – for now, suffice to say that a storytelling conceit is something about storytelling that divorces it from what we might consider absolute realism.  For instance, a common conceit in secondary world fantasy is the story being told “in translation,” as it were, as if the author/narrator somehow gained knowledge of this story and is telling it to an Earthly audience.  Another, and one I wrestle with deploying, is the alignment of climaxes.

Is there a market for stories that break the expected structure, where the climaxes don’t quite align, and are instead more reflective of the timing we might expect in the “real world?”  Perhaps.  I turn again, as I have many times in writing Impressions, to Laurus.  As different as Laurus is from Impressions, I find in Vodolazkin’s writing something akin to what I am attempting to do.  His titular character does not follow a standard narrative structure, and he doesn’t so much engage with a plot as he does…live.  This in no way reduces the drama of the story, but it does change the way the story reads, and it can lead to a story feeling quieter.  Impressions, really, is a quiet story.

It becomes a choice, then, as almost everything is when it comes to storytelling.  Timing your climaxes to align, or nearly align, will make each individual climax that much more impactful, a bit like superposition of waves in an interference pattern.  Part of what makes Stormlight books so powerful is the way the climax of the character arc doesn’t just coincide with the climax of the plot arc, but rather they directly enable and relate to each other.  This speaks to the importance of subgenres for managing reader expectations.  A reader expecting an epic fantasy expects a powerful climax of simultaneous or near simultaneous arcs, while a reader who picks up a book knowing it is a historically adjacent fantasy might expect something quieter, with smaller climaxes happening in different and not really related points, if anyone but me knew what that subgenre meant.