“I Go Up, I Come Down” by Alison Powell (Fiction ’10)

I Go Up, I Come Down

Pyramid

Freytag’s pyramid is, by all accounts, the cleanest model for writing fiction. A novel, as it happens. Start low. Ascend. Reach a climax. Descend. Oh, I said, in middle age. That’s easy enough. And I set about writing a book in which a group of teenage distance runners climb a mountain. I mean, look, there’s the map. Up, up, up they go. Scramble over brambles, tangle with branches, shins skim rocks.