Story structure
Dramatic structure
The framework underlying a story's construction: how its elements are ordered and unified, from Aristotle and Freytag to the three-act model.
Dramatic structure (more generally, story or narrative structure) is "the recognizable or comprehensible way in which a narrative's different elements are unified," including the order they arrive in; in theatre the term of art is dramatic structure. The oldest layer is Aristotle's Poetics, which advocated a two-part plot, the desis and lysis (binding and unbinding); the three-act idea often credited to him is a false attribution.
The nineteenth-century layer is Gustav Freytag's Die Technik des Dramas (1863), whose pyramid of five parts (introduction, rise, climax, return or fall, catastrophe) laid the foundation for the three- and five-act structures that followed. For novelists, dramatic structure is the question behind every framework in this glossary: what are the parts, where do the turns fall, and does every setup pay off? Start with the three-act structure guide and its beats, from the rising action to the denouement.