I was in my office last night (a crappy one room dive filled with generation "can-you-hear-me-now's") with a buddy when we touched on the subject of climaxes. I made a personal adjustment to my writing technique, as I'm told writers will do. It goes like this.
Think of a climax, a climactic action-action being the key here-that the hero and/or villain go through where it's outcome is so final that the audience (insert lesson from R. McKee's Story here) "cannot imagine another conflict". That kind of action. What is the action? What is it?
Is it blowing up a shark? Jaws. Walking out on your family? Ordinary People. Living through the passing of your only daughter in bedraggled clothes? Terms of Endearment. Goading a trigger happy prison guard to shoot you through a church window? Cool Hand Luke.
Any action.
Now. Come up with your own. Preferably the one you wrote. What is that action? Now ask yourself this. Does it resonate? Will the reader understand that it is a climax? How?
Here's what I've been belaboring. Any action can be climactic IF YOU PLANT IT'S PROBABILITY OF HAPPENING in act I. This may be a no brainer to you, but the scabs just fell off my eyes with this. And I've been writing for four years now. Coming up with a climax is as easy as saying, "what do I want that action to be?" Choosing it. And then attaching a story value to it early on so readers will know this is the ultimate length the hero will/must/must not go to X,Y,Z.
I know, I know. Then why do some climaxes fizzle? Answer: taste. It wasn't important to enough people, but to just the right people to get left in the story. What can I say? No accounting for blah, blah, blah.
Pardon my idiot savant excitement over what seems to be a simple fundamental of the craft; but like I said, it just rang true to me. Now I look forward to my ending and conjure that climax, that final showdown, that action. Define it. The rest of my climax conjuring is to make sure it resonates to my reader. This is the climax because back on page X when he said she might have to BLANK, or else THIS. I don't want to ruin the...well, you know.
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