Robert McKee’s five-component story structure

Inciting Incident: a disruptive event shatters the protagonist’s equilibrium and creates a problem that cannot be ignored.

Progressive Complications: a series of increasingly difficult, causally linked obstacles intensify conflict and pressure the protagonist to adapt.

Crisis: the protagonist faces an unavoidable, mutually exclusive dilemma that forces a defining choice.

Climax: the protagonist acts on that choice in a decisive confrontation that resolves the central conflict and expresses the story’s theme.

Resolution: the story reveals the consequences of the climax and the new emotional or moral reality of the protagonist’s world.