The Crisis Matrix in a Short Story

The fifth commandment, the resolution, comes out of the climax. The crisis matrix gives you a check list of things that need to be established before the protagonist makes this decision. And what happens is if you don't respect the crisis matrix as you're building the resolution, it undercuts all that emotional investment that your reader made. If you realize that the crisis doesn't really matter, that the resolutions kind of, they work out the way they'll work out, you're teaching sam this is a chaotic world where nothing really matters.