“Make America Great Again,” Donald Trump’s Campaign Slogan.This even an arc I used in my book Crowdsourcing Paris. This is one of the most common and highly rated arcs, where the slope rises/falls and then rises/falls again, forming what looks like a hole. Often addiction stories or stories about mental health fit into this structure. In a Riches to Rags story, the protagonist begins the plot in a fairly high place, but slowly their life devolves until by the end, their life is a ruin of its former self.
However, this movement is in the opposite direction, a fall rather than a rise. My Fair Lady (film) / Pygmalion (play) by George Bernard ShawĪs with Rags to Riches, in a Riches to Rags story, there is just one movement.The Rags to Riches story arc is one of the most common story types, but these stories lag in popularity, according Reagan, the researcher from the University of Vermont, who found that other arcs were more widely read. In the “ Rags to Riches” story arc, that movement is a continuous upward climb toward a happily ever after. Rags to Riches (rise)Īll stories move, but some stories only have one movement. You can find the full study, Toward a Science of Human Stories, here (the part we’re talking about begins on page 73). In fact they found that stories fall into six primary arcs, which I’ll list below. That’s what Andrew Reagan and his team of researchers from the University of Vermont found after analyzing over 4,000 of the best novels from the Project Gutenberg library. Yes, stories must change, but that doesn’t mean they all change in the same ways.īut when you compare the story arcs of the best stories throughout history, patterns begin to emerge, and you find that these arcs are much more uniform than you might think. In fact, story arcs can often look more like this than a smooth curve: Story arcs of course do not always follow such simple graphs. Get The Write Plan planner today The 6 Primary Story Arcs It's the planner designed by writers, for writers so you actually finish your book. Then, you'll track your writing each day until you reach the final page. You'll start by creating a plan for your story (including drawing your story's arc!). Want to write a story? Get The Write Plan Planner to write your way from idea to finished book. In other words, some story arcs illustrate things separate from the main character's development, which we'll talk more about in the section “Story Arcs Measure Values” below.
However, while all character arcs are story arcs, not ALL story arcs are character arcs. That means that story arcs can also be character arcs, illustrating the character development that occurs throughout the plot. The x-axis of the graph describes the chronology of the narrative and the y-axis describes the positive or negative value the main character experiences. Here is a simple graph of a dramatic arc that Kurt Vonnnegut describes as “Man in a Hole”: This change, the rise and fall in a story, can be plotted on a graph to form a curve shape line.Īnd when you graph them, you begin to see patterns across all forms of story. The rise and fall of characters’ fortunes interest us more than anything else.
If there is no rise or fall in a narrative, it isn’t a story.