The Fiction Toolkit, Part 2
Shelly Lowenkopf -- March 20, 2006
Another in a series of excerpts from Shelly Lowenkopf's forthcoming book, The Fiction Writer's Tool Kit: Terms, Concepts, and Devices for Building a Better Story. In this article Shelly examines "arc."
arc -- the name given to the real or apparent path a story takes after it is set in motion. Where does the story go, once it has begun?
Arc is a major concern of readers (though they may not know the term), who come to story with multifarious expectations. Most readers will agree on having expectations of entertainment or being transported to some remarkable state of awareness or feeling. As writers, we also have concerns about where the story should go. Most of us will agree to the need for concerns about readers and their expectations. When we speak of story arc, we're artfully combining drama with astronomy, referring to the movement of reader concerns with the fate of characters in the former case and conflating that concern with the movement of a celestial body above or below the horizon in the latter case.
The mere use of the word "arc" to describe the path of a given story is a reminder that reader and writer are leery of any story with a flattened arc. Thanks to medical dramas on television, readers and writers have lively awareness of the flat, non-pulsing line on the oscilloscope screen, indicating that the patient has died. A story without arc becomes a flat line of event to which we apply the word episodic. A good definition of episodic in this context can be had by listening to a pre-teen, reciting in what seems to be endless detail the "and then they" of a film they have just seen. Soon, as these youngsters move through their teens, they become aware of the key word in story and narrative, because.
Because is the great driving force of story; characters do things because. Because they feel like it. Because they have to. Because they are working against a deadline or an implacable foe.
Story arc is momentum informed by volition; it is episode injected with because and given frequent supplementary doses of "as a consequence."
In a different but not unrelated context, Mark Twain speaks to us of the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. Here, we ask you to consider the difference between the fully extended snake exposing the length of its body to the morning sun against the image of the coiled snake, ready if need be to strike; of the difference between a slender boa constrictor and one with a conspicuous bulge, suggesting it has just dined on some varmint.
Shelly Lowenkopf's soon-to-be-published The Fiction Writer's Tool Kit: Terms, Concepts, and Devices for Building a Better Story. is more than a lexicon. It defines a conceptual language for thinking about fiction, providing the writer with the tools to raise the level of craftsmanship of his own work.