Writers have to be able to suspend disbelief. Granted, we hope for a little reader buy-in, for the reader to gamely challenge us to send them to the moon, or to a hidden hell, or to some snowy landscape behind all the jackets in the wardrobe, but one of the keys to the kingdom is to make it reasonably plausible-sounding. As a writer of RATHER SPECULATIVE things (ghosts, backwoods cannibals, and monsters of every stripe) I feel I've got to work a little harder at that than someone who might pen stories about teenagers who overcome the adversity of high school peer pressure, or even legal thrillers.
I'm good with that. A measure of verisimilitude goes a long way, and once a really good writer gets hold of you, he or she can take you anywhere. So...does anyone's life, or even a portion of it, really follow the structure of the pyramid? Hell no. That would be terribly depressing.
I heard secondhand about Kurt Vonnegut speaking on the terrible structure of Hamlet. He held that there was nothing in that masterpiece of tragedy. No rising action at all, it hugs the baseline from the beginning until the climax, and then the bottom falls out. The EKG line drops off the chart entirely, and stays there until the play ends, when practically everyone dies. Poor Yorick, my ass.
Nope.
All I'm saying is that the writer should simply be the conduit for the story, the little hook thingy that Doctor Emmett Brown set up to channel the lightning into the flux capacitor and send Marty McFly rip-assing off to the future. YES, ABSOLUTELY, THE STORY IS A DAMNED TIME-TRAVELING DELOREAN, WHAT OF IT?
Whatever the story calls for is what goes into it. You might have a story whose measure of tension stays all the way at the top of the tension axis, or yours may hammer up and down like the pulse rate of a rabid squirrel on meth. WHATEVER , DUDE, JUST WRITE IT.
Tell the story, tell it as well as you can, as honestly as you can, and you won't be wrong.
Take care, keep writing, and keep reading!
--Dev