Authors: Jordan Rosenfeld
•The climax event must be directly related to the significant situation.
• Confrontation must be central. Your protagonist must confront something or someone (this can be an inner confrontation in a more literary novel) so he can change or be changed.
•The stakes should be very high: life and death, ties about to be severed, kingdoms on the verge of being lost.
•The pace must be swift, but allow room for emotional content.
Remember that the climax is also the point of no return. Once your protagonist arrives here, there is no turning back; character and plot will be changed permanently. Therefore, a climactic scene tends to fall toward the end of your narrative because there is a lot less to do after the climax. In a literary novel, an epiphany scene can serve as the climactic scene—a character's epiphany may be big enough to carry a climax. The narrative will feel less urgent, less intense to the reader as you work to tie up remaining threads.
SETTING UP A CLIMACTIC SCENE
A climactic scene should not come as a total surprise to the reader. If anything, it may come as a relief, because scenes prior to this one should have increased in tension and suspense, and become more emotionally dramatic for your protagonist, clueing the reader in that a terrible collision (literal or figurative) is on its way. If you have created more consequences for your protagonist in the middle of your narrative, he should be under a great deal of obvious stress, and knee-deep in conflict by the time the climactic scene arrives.
You want your climactic scene to open with a clear sense of action and drama about to unfold, and one very powerful way to do that is to leave the scene before it on a note of suspense or tension, or in some other way that suggests conflict is coming.
Robert Heinlein's astonishing science fiction novel
Stranger in a Strange Land
tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith—a human child born on Mars and raised by Martians. When he is brought back to Earth he has a volatile and transformative effect on everyone, and eventually becomes the ringleader of a cult in which everyone is taught to see themselves as God and jealousy, competition, and ambition are abolished. This leads to a blissful commune which, naturally, threatens "civilized" society. Michael's goal is to introduce all of humanity to this way of being, but there are forces against him.
At the end of the scene prior to the climactic scene, Michael—who has been meditating for a long time on how to handle the fact that humans, en masse, don't take too kindly to the kind of ideals he wants to teach them, and consequently want him dead—comes to a decision point:
Then Mike's eyes opened, he grinned merrily. "You've got me all squared away, Father. I'm ready to show them now—I grok the fullness." The Man from Mars stood up. "Waiting is ended."
While the reader doesn't know exactly
what
he's going to do, his words signal that action is coming in the next scene and that it will be big. And so it is. In the next scene, Mike leaves "the Nest"—the place where his group of followers lives—and goes out into the stormy lynch mob of a crowd that is waiting for him. They stone him and call him names, but he speaks his truth, even though he knows that they want to kill him:
"Blasphemer!"
A rock caught him over his left eye and blood welled forth.
Mike said calmly, "In fighting me, you fight yourself ... for Thou Art God ... and I am God ... and all that groks is God—there is no other."
We'll talk more about how this scene unfolds further in the chapter. First, though we'll look at
two
scene endings prior to the climactic scene of one of the most wonderfully weird, dark, and yet human novels I've ever read,
Geek Love
by Katherine Dunn. This discussion should help you think about how to set up your climactic scene a
few
scenes in advance.
In
Geek Love,
the Binewskis are a carnival family—in order to secure their livelihood, parents Al and Lily make sure that their offspring are suitably carnival-worthy by experimenting with chemicals and drugs during each pregnancy. They wind up with a set of Siamese twins, Elly and Iphy; Arturo the "Aqua Boy," who has flippers instead of limbs; Olympia, or "Oly," a "hunchback albino" dwarf; and Chick, who has telekinetic powers and can make people think whatever he chooses. The novel is written as Oly's mem-oir—though most of the time, the scenes are so vivid, the reader forgets that all that is happening has in essence already happened.
Despite the horrific and absurd nature of the premise,
Geek Love
is a serious book in which serious things happen to the characters. As the family of freaks grows up, Arturo—who has long been the star of the show—develops a megalomaniacal need for attention and power, and exerts more and more control on all his family members, since there would be no show without him. He develops a following of people who worship him, and he uses his brother Chick's powers to get these people to do as he wants.
At the end of the chapter that precedes the climactic scene, protagonist Oly has been forced to give away her infant daughter, Miranda, because her brother Arty feels she is a "norm" who can't contribute to their act. Because Oly is afraid of him and afraid for her daughter, she kowtows to Arty and does as she is told, but not without resentment. Here is how the scene ends, setting the reader up for the climax to come two scenes later:
My job was to come back directly, with nothing leaking from beneath my dark glasses, to give Arty his rubdown and then paint him for the next show, nodding cheerfully all the while, never showing anything but attentive care for his muscular wonderfulness. Because he could have killed you. He could have cut off the money that schooled and fed you. He could have erased you so entirely that I never would have had those letters and report cards and photos, or your crayon pictures, or the chance to spy on you, and to love you secretly when everything else was gone.
The statement "when everything else was gone" is the reader's first clue that bad things are coming in the next scene, which takes place a year later in time, though it doesn't feel like it. The next scene is very short and shows Arty at his narcissistic height, with Oly still tending to him in her fear. That scene ends with this strangely foreboding image of Arty:
When it was set, the final greasing had a sheen of its own and kept the white on even through the final hour under water with Arty squirming his wildest. The white tipping and streaking were new touches. Arty examined himself in the mirror and his wide mouth wriggled from corner to corner.
You get the feeling that this is the last close-up of Arty the reader is going to get. This is Arty at his pinnacle, blind to what is about to happen. There's something about the line "Arty squirming his wildest" that suggests perhaps death throes, or pain. And anytime you end a scene with a narcissistic character admiring himself in the mirror, you're setting up the reader to knock him off his throne. The scene nicely sets the stage for the climax that follows (which comes later in this chapter).
Setting up your climactic scene requires that you lace the ending of the prior scene or two with a sense of impending doom or instability. It needs to be clear to the reader, whether through simple interior monologue, or by some combination of setting detail and action, that change is coming.
THE CLIMACTIC EVENT
The actual opening of your climactic scene can be handled in many ways. Most climactic scenes get quickly to the action—after all, you've held the reader off for a long time already. Don't waste too much time setting up the opening; let things build fast.
The nature of a climactic scene is that it builds quickly and steadily toward the climax, with the pacing of an action scene. This is not a scene where you want to linger in lots of exposition, as what makes a climactic event is that it happens too fast to be stopped. The best climactic scenes have all the elements working together: specific action; dialogue rather than interior monologue to convey what's happening; setting details to balance the action, and to build atmosphere for the climactic event—details are good in a climactic scene because so much is at stake that you don't want the reader to feel he missed anything; and emotional content—the protagonist's feelings should be conveyed in some way, from fear to relief.
Let's look at how these details play out in the
Stranger in a Strange Land
climactic scene. Remember, it opened with Michael walking out to face his foes and being attacked. As the scene progresses, the crowd is getting more aggressive, but Michael doggedly continues to speak his message of love:
"God damn it—let's stop this taking the Name of the Lord in vain!" — "Come on men! Let's finish him!"
[Dramatic tension.]
The mob surged forward, led
by one bold with a club; they were on him with rocks and fists, and then with feet as he went down.
[Action.]
He went on talking while they kicked his ribs in and smashed his golden body, broke his bones and tore an ear loose.
[Very specific details.]
At last someone called out, "Back away so we can get the gasoline can on him."
[Dialogue.]
The mob opened up a little at that warning and the camera zoomed to pick up his face and shoulders. The Man from Mars smiled at his brothers, said once more, softly and clearly, "I love you."
[Emotional content.]
An incautious grasshopper came whirring to a landing on the grass a few inches from his face
[Lovely details deliver a momentary pause before the finale.];
Mike turned his head, looked at it as it stared back at him. "Thou art God," he said happily and discorporated.
(Discorporated,
for those who haven't read the book, means that his soul has left his body.)
Notice that the pace is quick due to the action and dialogue, yet through the use of focused details, like the camera zooming in on him, and the landing of the little grasshopper, the pace is slowed just enough so that the action doesn't move too fast to overwhelm the impact of what is happening. The statements "I love you" and "Thou art God" convey an emotional tone— and in contrast to the mob that is tearing him apart, despite that this is his death, Valentine Michael Smith seems at peace. This is a more emotional climactic event.
You may choose an emotional climactic event when the content of your narrative has dealt more with relationships or inner conflict, or any kind of powerful emotional content.
In
Geek Love
's climactic event, Dunn also utilizes all the elements of a scene for a complex, emotional, detailed, and powerful climax. Unlike Hein-lein, she strings together a series of small, terrible events that build more action and intensity into the final moment—there's not a lot of time for the reader to feel anything but a mounting sense of horror. First, Iphy kills her Siamese twin, Elly (a suicide, essentially, as they share organ systems), claiming that Elly killed her baby, Mumpo. That's three tragedies right there in a row. Chick and Oly rush in, and Chick tries to use his mental power to bring them back to life, but of course he cannot. Chick, who was devoted to the twins, is devastated, and decides that it is all Arty's fault; in a brilliant stroke of character, the normally calm, sweet, devoted one finally blows— literally, with this climactic event:
It came billowing, scorching toward us, and the Chick, in his pain, could not hold himself but reached. I felt him rush through me like a current of love to my cross points, and then draw back. I, with my arms lifted, felt his eyes open into me, and felt their blue flicker of recognition. Then he drew back. ... The flames spouted from him — pale as light—bursting outward from his belly. He did not scream or move but he spread, and my world exploded with him, and I, watching, bit down—bit down and knew it—bit down with a sense of enormous relief, and ground my teeth to powdered shards—and stood singed and grinding at the stumps as they died—my roses—Arty and Al and Chick and the twins — gone dustward as the coals rid themselves of that terrible heat.
Here, the climactic event is a kind of relief for Oly, who never felt that she had any control over what was happening to her. It reveals to her that she
was
powerless, and now it's over before she can stop it.
The goal of the climactic event is to bring significant situation and the resulting plot consequences to a head so that there's some kind of transformation in your protagonist's life or struggle. The climax is the moment where the protagonist is tested, tried, and permanently altered by whatever happens.
A climactic event does not have to be subtle—you can launch into your climax in no uncertain terms; the only real goal is that the events of the action bring your significant situation to a logical head. This next example is from Sara Gruen's novel
Water for Elephants,
set in the prohibition era of the United States, and starring Jacob Janowski, a young man whose dreams of taking over his father's veterinary business are dashed when his parents are killed in a car accident. To escape his grief, he jumps on a random train one night only to find himself an unwitting new part of the Benzini Brothers Circus come morning.