How-to writing books and literary analysis courses have
distilled storytelling conventions this way:
Inciting
incident > Main Character accepts the challenge >Three attempts in increasing
intensity at resolution > Climax/crisis> Resolution.
The most amusing pithy presentation on story ARCs is this
mini joyride of a
presentation by Kurt Vonnegut here, well worth the seventeen minutes it
takes.
There are posts online that show simple graphs of story ARCs,
such as this:
This is the tried and true. No argument there.
But then, ever so rarely, someone challenges these conventions
and (even rarer) succeeds in making something new and wonderful. I was intrigued
to read
a post on this here.
When I began writing, I knew less about writing conventions
and I did in fact write less conventionally. By now the story-ARC rules are so ingrained in me that I wonder if
I even could, or dare, to set them aside.
But it’s food for writerly thought.
4 comments:
I'm always interested in a writer, whether it's a novel or a film script, who can take conventions and turn them upside down and sideways. The movie that always comes to mind is My Best Friend's Wedding. All along I expected the groom to end up with his former lover, who now thinks she wants to marry him. But ultimately he marries the bride.
Love,
Janie
Thanks for the link to Kurt Vonnegut. He is both entertaining and philosophical.
Some of the folktales I grew up with don't have the traditional Western arc. When I've read some of them now, they don't resonate as much as they did back then. I've changed. But it's definitely I want to explore more. Then there's the hero's journey vs. the heroine's.
I noticed that often people who manage to escape the trap of predictability are deeply interested in cultures that lay far outside of their bubble. For example, H. Hesse had a lifelong fascination with India; he suspends time beautifully in “the glass bead game” and gives sense of oceanic impersonal forces directing the process of life in a spirit typical of eastern cultures.
In music, G. Ligeti wrote in my opinion the best piano cycle in the XX century - three books of piano etudes. It came out as a result of a rather zany mix of his Hungarian sensibility and fascination with African rhythms.
But, the opposite can be said as well - in order to avoid the slumber of repetition, one may dig to the core of his time and place to find its predicates. Woody Allen and Pushkin come to mind.
The key is intentionality…
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