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.
