Dual climaxes

I recently read a story in which the writer had two villains whose respective plotlines had very different endings. One villain was heading for an action climax with a dramatic set-piece battle scene; the other was heading for an emotional confrontation ending in the revelation of all her machinations. The author chose to present the emotional climax-of-revelation first and the action-centered fight scene second, making the action scene the apparent climax of the novel.

On the face of it, this sounds like a good choice. Action and drama are usually high points in a story; the climax of the novel is usually the highest high point, so obviously the action climax should be the novel’s climax. Also, a lot of writing advice tends to lean toward action.

In my opinion, though, it didn’t work in this case. Why? Well for starters, the action villain was easier to defeat. The big fight was dramatic, but by the time it rolled around it was a foregone conclusion. Second, the manipulative villain was in many ways a bigger threat to the heroes than the action villain. The good guys were well-equipped for a physical fight, but not so good at coping with duplicity and betrayal of trust.

Getting rid of the manipulator first took a lot of the pressure off of the fight with the action villain. With the manipulative villain gone, there was no one left to sabotage the good guys (the way she had been secretly doing for most of the book), plus the good guys had all the secret information the manipulator had been hoarding. Defeating the action villain felt like a cakewalk.

The writer’s choice could have worked really well if they’d played up the devastating emotional impact of the revelations on the good guys. On the night before the battle, they suddenly don’t know who to trust; their estimates of the enemy army strength are low; the enemy might already know their plans and be prepared for them, or one of the manipulator’s minions might still be intending to switch sides in mid-battle. In short, taking out the emotional villain first would have worked if it had been presented as making the action threat worse (or at least, revealing that the first villain’s manipulations had already made things far worse than anybody realized), thus reinforcing the action climax as the true climax of the story.

Dealing with the manipulator first could also have worked if the second, action climax had been downplayed slightly and made into more of a confirmation that the good guys have won. This route would make the revelation climax the true climax of the story, and the battle more of a validation (because yes, defeating the action-villain really is much, much easier without the real villain getting in the way. Sort of the way it was much easier for the hobbits to get rid of Saruman/Sharkey after Sauron was defeated). Or it could have been used as an opportunity for the good guys to be clever – action-villain expects a signal from manipulator-villain, but now that the good guys know that, they can coax him into a trap…

Alternatively, the author could have reversed the order of the subplot climaxes, putting the action climax first and the revelation climax second. In the story-as-written, this would actually have been less work – the action climax already felt a bit too easy to be the true climax of the story, so all the writer would nave needed to do was to punch up the emotional/revelation climax a little to make it clear that it really was more important than the battle.

I had two takeaways from considering this particular story:

First, how the writer presents events determines how important they feel to the reader … and the order they’re presented in is only one aspect of “how the writer presents events.” The climax of the story builds on everything that has gone before. It doesn’t matter how wonderfully dramatic and exciting the final battle is, if the story up til then has had more bits that focus on the protagonist’s problematic relationship with his father than on how important it is to win the battle. This was, in essence, the problem with the story I described above:  The writer had spent so much time on the manipulator’s subplot that, absent any other factors, the manipulation-revelation climax felt like the end of the story, and the battle like an anticlimax.

Second, the dual-plot climax works best when the two climaxes reinforce each other somehow. If one can manage to have both plotlines culminate in the same scene, that’s great, but more often, it’s a matter of one scene for each climax. At that point, what matters is how the two scenes play together. If the one that’s the overall story-climax comes first, you probably want the second scene to feel more like a validation (look: defeating Villain #1 really does make everything else easier). If the overall story-climax comes second, you probably want the first scene to make the heroes less likely to deal well with the second situation. It doesn’t matter whether they’re in worse shape emotionally, mentally, or physically, as long as solving Scene One means they’ll have a harder time solving Scene Two.