Today I was trying to figure out if there was a word for the thing that I wanted a word for, which is something that happens around here fairly often. In the process of doing that, I realized that I might not be thinking about the way stories work the same way that other people who make stories do.

Let us consider the roller coaster.

There may be some people reading this who have never ridden a roller coaster -- my spouse, for example. If she's ever ridden one, it was when she was very young and promptly vowed never to make that mistake again. She can't even watch ride-view footage of roller coasters. I personally love roller coasters but I can't ride them much now because I'm getting old and my body can't take it. Roller coasters are for people with younger spines.

Nowadays there are roller-coasters with all kinds of fancy shit like linear accelerators that could be anywhere on the track so you never know what you're going to get, but an old-school gravity roller coaster starts with a chain lift. Clack clack clack clack as your car is slowly pulled up to the top of the track and your anticipation builds. And then you get over the top of the lift hill and you get your first good look at the twisted maze of timber (or metal) waiting for you, and then suddenly you're off the chain and the rest is zoom.

A classic out-and-back roller coaster only lifts once. After the lift hill, there is no propulsion. The rest is gravity playing out. And that's the whole ride.

When I plot and write a story, I think of it as having a bell-curve shape. Except it's better to think of it as a hill. First you spend a certain amount of time pushing the story up the hill, developing it. Then you hit the top of the hill, and the rest of the story is a downhill toboggan run. Whee!

The hill/curve is not always symmetric. A roller coaster, for example, would have a hill that leans to the left -- that is, is much steeper on its left side -- that is, um, the uphill portion takes up much less of the length of the story than the downhill part. Am I making sense? Thirty seconds of lift hill and three minutes of ride.

There are also stories where the hill slants the other way. The most striking example of this I can bring to mind is a novel called Topsy Dingo Wild Dog by Camilla Carr. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who's ever read it. It is four hundred and nineteen pages (hardcover), and most of that is, quite honestly, a slog through a parade of textbook Deep South eccentrics and vulgarities that some people would probably find amusing and/or enjoyable, but not me. I got fed up with that particular aspect of the southern mythos a long, long time ago. However, it turns out this long climb is necessary, because Carr is actually telling an enormous shaggy-dog story and the slow burn is essential to the payoff. On page three hundred and eleven, Arabella du Noir arrives on the scene, and from then on the last fifth of the book is one of the most out-of-control, hilarious downhill sled runs I've ever been on.

But I digress.

My question, the question which started this whole line of thought, is: What do you call the point in the story where you reach the top of the lift hill?

Do not call it the climax. Yes, if you look at standard three-act or five-act structure, I can see how you'd get there, but that's wrong. Well, not necessarily wrong, but it's wrong in the model I'm describing. In the story structure I'm describing, the climax is something different and it comes later.

Here, let me show you with an example of a type I write a fair bit of: A detective procedural.

As our story begins, our detective is presented with a situation of some kind, which she's coming into from blank. She has to gather information, talk to people, possibly get into trouble, maybe get beaten up and thrown into the dumpster behind the bar because she asked the wrong person the wrong question. She has to get to know the other players, get propositioned, get threatened, ask a cute librarian to look up things for her, and so on. All of this is the lift hill.

It doesn't mean there shouldn't be adventures and points of interest while we're climbing that hill with her. We are not allowed to be boring! You have to hold everyone's attention during the climb. And the longer the climb, the more you have to rely on subplots and other bits of business to keep everybody happy.

This is why we have to be very careful about not describing this part as "exposition." First, as noted, it could be the larger part of the story! Second, "exposition" means description or information that is handed to the audience without accompanying activity. An infodump. These were always bad; they are now extra-bad in the world of the thirty-second attention span, where the majority of your "readers" do not actually read and are incapable of it. In these parts we try to avoid exposition whenever possible.

Anyway, at some point our detective has enough information to put everything together and realize what is actually going on. She has cracked the case. Now, there's a big difference between that and solving the case. There's still a lot to be done, y'know? But the point where the detective realizes what's what -- where she knows what she has to do to proceed -- that's the top of the lift hill. It's gravity from here on. No new information will be collected; instead, we now deploy the information we spent the uphill part collecting.

But this point is not the climax. The climax comes later -- possibly much later. The climax is when the detective confronts the story's antagonist, and there is a fight or possibly even somebody gets shot. The climax is always the final conflict and/or resolution of the story.

And no, the downhill portion of the story is not "denouement." Denouement is the part that happens after the climax; the sweeping-up. The goodbyes. The explanations of How It Was Done. The chaste (or not-so-chaste) kiss from the grateful ingenue. Et cetera. In my plot notes I tend to refer to the denouement as the "post-mortem" section of the story (with the understanding that it may not literally be a post-mortem, although it sometimes is).

If you like, you can add a flat section on either end of the bell curve, if you'd like to make room for initial exposition (if you must) and denouement; but neither of these is part of the rise and fall of the story proper. Those are the boarding and disembarking areas of the roller coaster and not part of the ride.

You see that none of the conventional terminology suits the roller-coaster model at all. And we still don't have a word for the top of the lift hill.

The reason I stepped into this quagmire in the first place was that I was trying to assess how far behind I am on the current story. See, here's the thing: It's the eleventh of October, nearly halfway through the month, and I'm trying to figure out if I'm nearly halfway through the story. If I'm not, I may have a problem.

I know where the top of the lift hill is. Well, no, that's not right. I know what it is. I don't know where it is.

What I mean is, I've got a plot outline, see? And I know exactly which plot point signals the beginning of the downhill run. What I don't have a good way of assessing is the relative lengths of "story up to that point" and "story after that point." It's difficult to translate these plot notes into page counts; I have no idea how long some of these scenes will be.

As of the moment I'm typing this, I have laid out nine pages and I have renders for about a page and a half more. I have two sequences to render before the inflection point of the story. That is, at the end of the second of those sequences, we have The Thing which flips the story from uphill to downhill. But how long are those two sequences? One of them could potentially be quite long (which, in this context, means more than two pages).

Let's say we have three and a half pages for those two sequences, plus the page and a half I haven't laid out yet. That means that, when the dust clears, it will have been thirteen pages to get to the top of the lift hill. That feels about par ... if the uphill and downhill portions are roughly the same length. But right now I have absolutely no idea if they are.

More to the point, if this is the somewhere-just-under-thirty-pages story I'm anticipating, that means I really need to average a page a day, at least as far as rendering and layout, and it's the eleventh and I've laid out nine pages. So I'm behind; I need to at least get eleven pages laid out by the end of the day.

However, this is doable, even given that it's one of the two designated TV nights and thus I will stop after dinner to watch an episode of "Leverage." You've got to have some joy in life.

Not that the story isn't bringing me joy. They always do, or I wouldn't do them. It's just that the joy comes with a lot of headaches.

Watch this space. There's a significant chance (I'd give it at least five-to-one) that somewhere in the next few days I'll realize that the distances are not equal and, while the uphill part of the story took thirteen to fourteen pages, the downhill part only takes five. It's been known to happen.

But that's OK. The thing is, I'd much rather finish early than finish late. I have plenty of other things I can do with that time.

I worked on renders while I was writing this entry.