Kinds of Plot Arcs?

Arc != change.

I agree, and this is something that I've not thought much about. Places would probably have longer arcs than do characters; the USA has changed a lot since 1776.

Right now I'm working on the first of what I believe will be a series of 5 novels that will span about 1000 years. The story starts in Colorado 100+ years from now, and the climate has changed to be something similar to North Carolina (hot, humid, and rain). At the end of the series the climate will be back to close to what it is now. The city of Boulder begins as a city of enlightenment, but is razed by an army, and by the end of the series it will look like a lumpy spot on the ground that hosts a buried treasure. So yes, places and locations change, but I think at a much slower pace than do characters.

onesecondglance said:

Arc != change.

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Maybe I'm not understanding your position - but I believe that Arc == change. ( != is the symbol for not equal... and '=' by itself is an assignment)

I'm dealing with an empire on the precipice of collapse and I've been pulling my hair out about how to SHOW this vs. tell it with a ton of history lessons. Some of what I came up with was to illustrate conflict between people from different nations, and how it plays out due to the shortcomings of the place in question. Still trying to think outside the box...

I think the more any variety of nouns change over the course of a book or series, the more intriguing the world becomes. Can anyone think of some good examples of non-person related change?

indianroads said:

Maybe I'm not understanding your position - but I believe that Arc == change. ( != is the symbol for not equal... and '=' by itself is an assignment)

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Yes - an arc is not the same thing as a change.

Stuff changes. That's the nature of fiction. If nothing changed, it would be boring. But "arc" is not a synonym for change.

An Arc, to my understanding, comes from the Narrative Arc. This involves defined moments, such as inciting incident, climax and drop or resolution.

However, as Laer suggests, there is no reason why the Arc concept cannot be applied to a number of different areas, certainly as an evaluation device (ie, have I hit the different points on this plot arc).

But phrases like Plot lines also exist. (where points are defined)

The Arc, being curved, is useful in relation to narrative, and character, because of tension/ pace and emotional changes along the way, slow, faster, very fast, slower, slow.

So in short, whatever makes evaluation of your work easiest, is the way to go. Arcs are nice, but lines are pretty ok too.

onesecondglance said:

Yes - an arc is not the same thing as a change.

Stuff changes. That's the nature of fiction. If nothing changed, it would be boring. But "arc" is not a synonym for change.

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Can you expand on this?

My WIP has five characters, all of whom must have a developmental arc. I had assumed that meant change. What else could an arc be? Or is it a specific type of change? A related change? Pole to pole? insecure -> confident as opposed to insecure -> lazy ?

Right.

Characters have arcs. This is a special kind of change that happens over a period of narrative time. As the character responds to and drives the plot events, they undergo complex and multi-staged change. Character arcs are central to the concept of the "hero's journey", where the resolution of their arc is very often some kind of "awakening" or new understanding of themselves, prompted by the experiences they've undergone. Arcs are a function of agency in the plot. Characters who have no agency in the plot don't tend to have arcs.

"Arc" means the sum of those changes, not each individual one. If you take a film like Miss Congeniality, Sandra Bullock's arc is not from tough FBI agent to beauty contestant. She's changing then, by doing something she's not used to, but this isn't an "arc" in itself. The arc ends at the end of the film, where Sandra has reconciled her notion of toughness with beauty. Before then, she's seen them as incompatible. Her new understanding is that they needn't be in conflict.

Now, very often you might see settings, plot pacing, other aspects varying to either reflect or contrast to a character arc. Settings in particular can sometimes be a metaphor for the character's inner struggle (see the idea of pathetic fallacy). But that doesn't mean the setting has an arc of itself. There it is reflecting the character arc. For the setting to have an arc, it would have to have agency within the plot, which isn't something you often see, especially if you think of plot as the result of characters interacting within a setting.

Arc is a specific word of the craft with a well-understood meaning. As I said before, virtually all fiction is about the process of change. But that doesn't mean that all of those changes are "arcs".

Arcs, at least in my opinion, really are heavily tied to the story and character. Can setting have an arc? Technically yes, but making people care about it would be incredibly difficult. Readers want to see how the story progresses, how the character grows, etc. Not many care that the lush forest changes to wasteland throughout the story. Why? Because environment is impersonal. It's a what, not a who. So what it really comes down to is those environments being metaphorical for the tone of the story itself more than an actual 'arc' for itself.

onesecondglance said:

Arcs are a function of agency in the plot. Characters who have no agency in the plot don't tend to have arcs.

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Ooo, I'm copying this into my character prep file. I specifically wanted five deeply flawed characters so I could push them into pole-to-pole changes (as described in Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing). This is what was missing. Those flaws need to drive the plot, first one way and then another.

And... it just gave me an idea for a broken novel I've been trying to fix for years. I have a character with an arc who has only a weak influence on the plot. Maybe if I set him loose to do some damage I could resuscitate the story.

onesecondglance said:

Settings in particular can sometimes be a metaphor for the character's inner struggle

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I have a habit of doing this. Emerging from underground as a metaphor for rebirth, or going from civilization to wilderness. My WIP wants to have an underwater section and I'm not sure why, but I don't tend to question those things.

Yum! So much food for thought.

This is interesting... because I've always looked at arcs a bit differently than is described here. I'm not arguing the point, but just saying that I've probably used them incorrectly.

If I understand what's being said, and an arc is the sum of the changes a character goes through, then I imagine that if we were to plot this arc on graph paper it would show up as a straight line. Character starts journey at coordinate 0,5, and finishes at 10,8 - and we're done.

The way I've looked at arcs are as the map of changes made over time. Character starts journey at coordinate 0,5, then moves: 1,4; 2,2; 3,1; 4,1; 5,2; 6,3; 7,5; 8,6, 9,7, and finally 10,8. So, for me it's more of a map of the conflict and / or mental state of the character over time.

Just my take on it - and I said, I'm probably wrong.

indianroads said:

This is interesting... because I've always looked at arcs a bit differently than is described here. I'm not arguing the point, but just saying that I've probably used them incorrectly.

If I understand what's being said, and an arc is the sum of the changes a character goes through, then I imagine that if we were to plot this arc on graph paper it would show up as a straight line. Character starts journey at coordinate 0,5, and finishes at 10,8 - and we're done.

The way I've looked at arcs are as the map of changes made over time. Character starts journey at coordinate 0,5, then moves: 1,4; 2,2; 3,1; 4,1; 5,2; 6,3; 7,5; 8,6, 9,7, and finally 10,8. So, for me it's more of a map of the conflict and / or mental state of the character over time.

Just my take on it - and I said, I'm probably wrong.

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An arc doesn’t have to be a straightforward growth- it’s just that the emphasis of the destination is important. They go from x to y but how they do that could involve two steps forward, five steps back.


As for the arc of a setting, arc doesn’t seem to be the right word unless the setting is somehow sentient. As another poster said, arcs are for characters with agency. A setting can change but it has no agency; changes in the setting tend to be pathetic fallacy (for example, a hip bar that becomes dated or a grand hotel that has become derelict). They tend to either reflect or contrast with character arcs- we care about them because we care about how they affect the characters and the community and because they are an effective way of showing that time has past.

The plot ‘arc’ you are describing is just the changing pace of the story.

Lady Ice said:

An arc doesn’t have to be a straightforward growth- it’s just that the emphasis of the destination is important. They go from x to y but how they do that could involve two steps forward, five steps back.


As for the arc of a setting, arc doesn’t seem to be the right word unless the setting is somehow sentient. As another poster said, arcs are for characters with agency. A setting can change but it has no agency; changes in the setting tend to be pathetic fallacy (for example, a hip bar that becomes dated or a grand hotel that has become derelict). They tend to either reflect or contrast with character arcs- we care about them because we care about how they affect the characters and the community and because they are an effective way of showing that time has past.

The plot ‘arc’ you are describing is just the changing pace of the story.

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Thanks for the information. A place can change in reference to the story, and that change can have an impact on the character. In my WIP the main characters are refugees of a city that was invaded and destroyed in the first few chapters of the book. The place then would by symbolic of the destruction of the characters past? and would it be a motivation in moving forward?

indianroads said:

Thanks for the information. A place can change in reference to the story, and that change can have an impact on the character. In my WIP the main characters are refugees of a city that was invaded and destroyed in the first few chapters of the book. The place then would by symbolic of the destruction of the characters past? and would it be a motivation in moving forward?

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Obviously in this case the place is changed because of the plot but yes, the destruction of the place is bound to feel like the destruction of their past. Not so much their past but the things that they had taken for granted, had assumed were 'safe'.

Harlequin said:

This doesn't follow.

All arcs can be changes, without all changes being arcs.

(Not saying they are, just quibbling with the premise.)

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That's literally what that says?

indianroads said:

This is interesting... because I've always looked at arcs a bit differently than is described here. I'm not arguing the point, but just saying that I've probably used them incorrectly.

If I understand what's being said, and an arc is the sum of the changes a character goes through, then I imagine that if we were to plot this arc on graph paper it would show up as a straight line. Character starts journey at coordinate 0,5, and finishes at 10,8 - and we're done.

The way I've looked at arcs are as the map of changes made over time. Character starts journey at coordinate 0,5, then moves: 1,4; 2,2; 3,1; 4,1; 5,2; 6,3; 7,5; 8,6, 9,7, and finally 10,8. So, for me it's more of a map of the conflict and / or mental state of the character over time.

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Some Newtonian physics might be relevant to the analogy, as well as math. In Newtonian physics, you can go in a straight line without any effort. Following an arc requires force. A character arc requires the character to take action.

Changes that aren't arcs are like lines. If a character goes to private school and then an Ivy League college and then becomes a Wall Street broker, that's not an arc. It's just a straight line. If the character sells all his possessions and becomes a Buddhist monk in Tibet, that would be an arc. Except if it's sudden that's more like turning a corner. An arc usually means a series of small turns adding up to a big change in direction. Which is also Newtonian. Sudden changes in direction are unnatural: all paths are smooth on some scale.

The path can be winding, as you describe, but I think there is usually a constant pull toward the final direction, and windings away from that course occur when more powerful but less persistent forces temporarily prevail.

Yes, you are quite right, I misread. My apologies!

An arc is most generally just a rise and fall in the plot. Rise in action, rise in tension, rise in outright conflict... But that isn't exactly what a plot arc or character arc is. It's that the plot, or character, rises and subsides in relation to the story and the characters that are part of it. Action, tension, drama, conflict or whatever builds to a peak and then returns to equilibrium and, along the way, changes occur to the characters, world, environment, theme or plot to accommodate that rise and return. The best plot arcs build with a main character arc, until that main character cannot possibly continue or persevere, and then, through some change in the character, pass through that change and the plot resolves according to the changed character.

Unless, of course, your story is different.

Jeff