The long middle stretch where complications escalate and pressure mounts toward the climax.
Rising action is everything between the inciting incident and the climax: the protagonist pursues the goal, opposition escalates, and each attempt raises the cost of the next. In three-act terms it's the whole confrontation act, the longest movement in almost any story.
The failure mode is a plateau instead of a slope - scenes that replay the same conflict at the same intensity. Working rising action ratchets: every complication should make the situation harder to walk away from than the one before it.
Go deeper: Three-Act Structure - beat sheet
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