Basic Story Arc 1.
Use this arc to document your story–plot the points of your story on the arc, and you’ll see if it goes off the rails at all, and how to implement a bit of flow and proper story arc to your story in order to get it arcing in the right direction. Every story follows a natural arc–it begins, you introduce the characters, they find out about one another and develop feelings and define their own inner conflict that leads to external conflict. Then, Crisis! The black moment where it looks as though they’ll never get together, followed by a realization of what they want and who they are, a coming together, and then a resolution of the situation leading to the Happily Ever After (HEA).
*Note* This is one example. There are tons out there, some with a sharp, short start to the arc and a longer resolution period, and some with a long build up and a short, sharp resolution period. The point of them is to make notes on this type of arc to see where your story is: where do YOU introduce your characters? Where is YOUR black moment? Does the first sex scene happen before the first kiss? If it does, is that a problem/does it make sense? Do you start resolving the problem before the black moment has even happened? If you do, can you do something to change that, and make the black moment that much stronger by not already starting it’s resolution before hand, thus making it even blacker? If you make simple notes along this type of arc, you’ll see where you may need to move some chapters around, insert extra scenes, etc.
Here is another arc–this one shows the balance of the story arc against the character arc.
story and character arc
When you’re building a story, you have (at least) two layers:
You’ve got a story arc, with a beginning, middle and end, and a logical progression through each step.
And you’ve also got a character arc, where you meet the character and see how the story changes them as they go along. They start one way, and end up another. This doesn’t have to be some huge change–they can just learn something about themselves, or learn to think differenlty about something particular. They can sense they have feelings for someone, particularly in a series where those feelings could develop in another book.
But they MUST change in some way. A character that is exactly the same from first moment to last is static and boring. Dynamic characters shift with the story, and by the time the story is resolved, so too should the character have some kind of personal revelation/resolution as well.
And you don’t want them changing at odds with your story. Some big self understanding that happens before your black moment doesn’t work–it’s the black moment that drives the characters growth. And you don’t want to struggle forever to get the character growth–if your story is done, your character should be about there as well. You don’t want another fifty pages of character growth when the story has long finished.
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This piece reminds me of the graphs – of emotions, of tasks accomplished or not – that I used to construct throughout much of my university education (concentrating, it probably seemed to others, too much on the sciences). I think I should return to them for my current editing/publishing challenges. In any case, thanks for the useful tips!
Glad you found it useful!!
Interesting stuff. I think each of my romance novels has at least a slightly different (in some cases, more than slightly different) character arc. The ones I’ve found trickiest are the ones in which the characters already know each other because then the trick is to not fall into the gaping hole of back story.
For example, in “Waiting,” the leads have been stepmother and stepdaughter for three years. Also, in my work in progress, the leads are two teachers, one of whom is a former student of the other teacher (plus another juicy connection I won’t reveal just yet!).
I think the arcs can differ, of course. I mean this one as a kind of beginners guide, along the lines of you-have-to-know-the-rules-to-break-them kind of thing.
The back story hole is one I help combat all the time, and that’s even when the characters don’t already know one another!
I actually use a slightly different arc for my romance stuff. the build to the black moment is much longer, the black moment being in the last 6 chapters, and the recovery from it being a very fast paced. I kind of think it terms of a heartbeat. Starts from a speed of “at rest” dum…..dum…..dum….dum….dum…dum…dum..dum..dum.DUM!.dum.dum.dum. but once it gets faster it’s never allowed to slow down again for the length of that piece of work. If you can maintain the speed of the crisis chapter through to the end, you’ll leave readers breathless. Personal opinion of course, but it’s a pattern used a lot in military fiction (huge fan there of) and it works extremely well there so…
Also I tend to use sex for comedy in my writing. I was a professional dominatrix, once upon a time, so when I started writing seriously I discovered that what I thought was mild sexual content, was actually hardcore erotica. After that I decided it was safer to use it for comedy. Seeing as I don’t want to end up with my stuff being sold in plain brown packaging.
Really nicely said Amanda! Do you have yours drawn up anywhere? if you do, please include a link to it, because I think a lot of people could really benefit from different arcs, since we all write from a different place. I provide this one to all my development authors as a very basic place to start, in order to understand how a story is constructed on a general basis. (Ie, it’s a mound, not a plain!)
Writing comedy in sex is a really great skill, and one that is so damn hard. I think writing humor in general is difficult, because you have to find a middle ground that a lot of people think is funny, versus a playing field where only a few people think it’s funny. Tough stuff–good on you for being able to do it!! I write a lot of sex, mostly light erotica, and I like doing it because of the passion it can incite in people.