Story arcs

Why how and when did people start referring to "arcs" when referring to narratives? And what relationship does it have to the word's geometric meaning, if any?

It has never made sense to me and the usage seems to be growing in popularity.

This question was posted by DJP saying on the Torchwood thread "The episode in and of itself was competent; it just didn't belong in this story arc."

But I have been wondering about it for a year or two since (of all things) I read an interview with Johnny Depp in an interview talking about the character of Captain Jack Sparrow and how the character had "no development arc".

tension -> conflict -> resolution

it's like the growing and squeezing of a pimple. story pimple arcs are a beautiful thing

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cKZg4GUlaz0/THWwtnjWW9I/AAAAAAAAABU/jg4Ycu4KiAc/s1600/freytag-3.gif

wow, that's great, makes perfect sense. Whose idea was it though?

devotion to the story arc convention is pretty dull tbh

darragh "all story arcs are dull" story arc is a pretty interesting story arc fyi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHVqxD8PNq8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure

best story arc- baxter in anchorman

Aristotle kinda formalized this stuff didn't he?

Captain Jack isn't the main character of Pirates (at least the first one). The Kira Knightly character is the one with the arc.

Like how Ferris Bueller isn't the main character of Ferris Bueller, it's Cameron.

blimey, this stuff is as old as the hills. Now I feel like I've been living under a stone.

http://www.identitytheory.com/etexts/poetics.html

Aristotle rather weirdly says it all has to happen in one day.

It was his "No film is ever good that stars Gabriel Byrne"

'arc' is a weird, pop-culturey mega-reduction of some pretty hefty narratological theory. It's a metaphor shorn of referents, and it doesn't actually make a lot of sense as a catch-all term for 'extended drama' but it's entered the public consciousness as a way to refer to extended drama in a series or individual piece of work. It's used in the same way that everybody's just kind of off-handedly started saying 'uncanny valley' like it's some deeply researched thing when really they're just quoting Freud without understanding the reference.

thankGod for the Shaw Brothers

Like how Ferris Bueller isn't the main character of Ferris Bueller, it's Cameron.

― Ask The Answer Man (sexyDancer), Friday, August 26, 2011 3:51 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

vs it should have been called ferris bueller's day on

the looseness of new and electronic media has helped people (read: not critics, not professional practitioners) to experiment and rebel against the constrains of traditional narrative form, and that's ultimately a good and invigorating thing. but often they're screwing around without the deep conceptual underpinnings that have heretofore been the bedrock for a lot of experimentation, and are approximating a theoretical language they don't entirely understand, and whose rich history is sometimes misunderstood. this is both a good and bad thing for the art, because it brings vibrancy and immediacy to the art, but at the cost of some formal and theoretical depth.

Like, there's more to consciously writing a film than reading Joseph Campbell and Robert McKee and listening to the commentary track of all the DVDs you bought at Best Buy.

not sure if i can pin down an actual usage, but joss whedon used to use it a lot to discuss the simplified shape he had in his head for where a given series would be going before any of the episodes were written: in other words, an indication of the start and end points, and some sense of the shape of how we're going to get from one to the other, without the detailed ep-to-ep ups and downs

arc isn't a bad term for that simplified path, really

have any actually good writers or dramatists begun from a mastery of "pretty hefty narratological theory"?

agreed, mark, and whedon (and other showrunners) use it to mean a very specific thing, not just 'big long drama.'

. but often they're screwing around without the deep conceptual underpinnings that have heretofore been the bedrock for a lot of experimentation,

yeah but "screwing around" can lead to great art

yeah, i said that

but joss whedon used to use it a lot to discuss the simplified shape he had in his head for where a given series would be going before any of the episodes were written

makes sense for shows like that: the showrunner does the arc, the writers do the episode-to-episode stuff (with the arc in mind)

david milch, david lynch (not a fan, but still), david simon to begin (2xp)

everybody named david is a narratologist

I don't think that adage that you have to know all the rules before you break them counts anymore.

yeah i was just going to say

ehh... it probably helps

nobody says you do? how about actually read what i wrote about before just reacting

not @ u history mayne

not to be grounded in narratological theory but, well, you know

xpost

if "hefty narratological theory" includes how maintain continuity, complexity and readable content in superhero comics, then whedon mastered this! but actually i'd call this "praxis" rather than "theory" -- there isn't a manual you read first

xxxxps to 'tension/conflict/resoultion',
just to add i always heard it, it particularly being westerns, described as 'order/disorder/order'. something fascinating about being able to break things down to this & still encompass so much, and then also to use it as a lens to consider things that deviate from the formula

Praxis is a better word. by 'hefty narratological theory' i don't mean sitting down and reading barthes and propp until your eyes bug out, but i do believe think that very few successful writers, especially of drama, are of the naive artist variety: they're students of the genre, thoughtful and formally inquisitive and not opportunists and pastiche-makers. this is espesh true of people like scorcese (who's open about it) and tarantino (who kind of pulls the 'aw shucks i just like movies' william faulkner routine) in that they are knowingly experimenting, but still using deep, historical, and considered elements from a rich tradition. the popular idea that story = arc is reductive and specious. "Story' is a loosely-defined term, meaning, roughly, a conglomeration of narrative elements united by some common thread, while arc refers to a particular kind of plotting device. Dramatists either consciously or unconsciously understand this, and recognize the necessity for both terms but would not conflate them. To reduce the important story in a piece of drama to nothing more than an arc is to reduce it to a shade.

hey i never said it wasn't reductive!

In the same way, you can say, for instance, that a screenplay has two parts (thesis/antithesis) three parts (Aristotelian acts), four parts (symphonic movements A, A', B, A'), five parts (Shakespearean acts), eight parts (the Sequence approach), 60-65 parts (scene-writing approach), but you're not getting (a) the commonality in all the patterns (b) the complex intentionality of the narrative construction (c) the fact that none of these deals with content.

this is all such interesting stuff. I feel very poorly educated. Not sure whether it is the fault of my schooling or me not having the curiosity/nous/whatever to actively seek this kind of thing out. I don't think I even knew the meaning of antagonist/protagonist until I was about 28. I am neither proud or embarrassed about this - just happens to be a fact.

I mean for what it's worth in my own practice, 'story' has come to represent the change in the centrally focalized/vocalized character (protagonist/antagonist force); hence story = character = character story, while 'arc' represents the overall shape/progression/unity of the conflicting forces or oppositional elements. Story: Hamlet wants to avenge his father / Arc: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

I think the term "arc" is used (and is useful as) a generalized term for any kind of narrative change or movement. So you can view the plot as an arc, you can view a character's development as an arc, you can view smaller subplots and the development of secondary characters as their own arcs, and you can view a larger progression over multiple storylines as a bigger arc, as seen in episodic television, multi-film franchises, etc.

In some TV these days you don't necessarily have one central plot per episode, but maybe two or three interwoven plots that all relate to some central theme (or not). And then on top of that you often have these slowly unfolding season-long plots. So it kind of makes sense to just think of these as arcs within arcs.

devotion to the story arc convention is pretty dull tbh

this is like saying that devotion to using organized sounds in music is dull. drama necessarily has to involve an arc of some sort. all literature or film doesn't necessarily have to be dramatic, but imo, you're either working in a dramatic form or not. kind of half-assedly working in a dramatic form while ignoring the idea of any kind of arcs doesn't make sense to me.

this is my point above. but i still contend that 'arc' is lazy and misses the intricate constructedness of good drama. The television convention of the teaser, then the A,B, and C (and sometimes D) story in four sequences is almost internalized at this point, but still they don't organically occur, they're built deliberately and painstakingly that way... and using the term 'arc' interchangeably to refer to the shape of an individual episode, individual story, multi-episode story, season-long thread, or multi-season progression misses the way they are accomplished using different tools, to different ends, and the conversation they have with each other.

i need an editor, sorry

what other terminology would you use then? particular writing might be lazy, but I don't see the problem with the term itself. the main "arc" of a given story can of course be called the plot, but what term would you use to describe the change that an antagonist goes through, or a long plot that is resolved over the course of several smaller independent stories or episodes?

and in fact, I think that by abstracting it out like that and referring to any kind of change or movement with the generic term "arc" it can help reveal the intricate construction of drama. I think it's a useful tool for helping to think about structure, at least maybe for a beginner. then once you start to see a drama as multiple movements that fit together you might move on to more complex thinking about how it all works, but a lot of people don't even get that far.

This is a thumbnail and I don't even subscribe to all of these exactly myself but:

An arc (arch) refers to an overhanging theme, concern, or unifying concept of a multi-part drama.

Plot is the central action motivated by character choice. (I.e. not just 'stuff that happens')

Subplot are secondary actions that run beside or against the main plot (parallel, confounding, antithetical... etc.) also motivated by character choice

Story is the broad, overall structure of the dramatic work and an agglutinated term containing all of the above, from a less.. character-centric point of view.

(i agree w/ your last post)

I guess I feel like referring to all of those disparate things under the umbrella term of arc sort of reinforces a sense of prosody. the idea that all of these elements are just tools that should be working together in the service of some kind of unified vision.

I agree w/ emphasizing the commonality, and acknowledge there's a natural prosody and a lot overlapping in the venn between season arc/episode arc/scene construction. but (by way of a half-assed metaphor) using the same term to discuss all of these dramatic elements is like using 'beautiful artistry' to describe both the composition of a painting and the way the canvas is neatly stretched over the frame. It 'fits,' but that's it.

I think it has more in common with a term like contrast. In a painting you can have contrast between dark and light colors, contrast between busy areas and sparse areas, the contrast between the form and the content, etc.

Or in music you can analyze the rhythm of a piece. Some people think of rhythm purely in terms of the beat, but there is also a rhythm to the melody, the rhythm of when the chords change, and the overall rhythm of the structure. If you don't think of these things as part of the rhythm of the piece, you may make arbitrary decisions or end up having the chords change always right on the bar, or have all of the sections of the piece be the same length.

Likewise in writing, I feel like too often writers add in subplots or character arcs that don't actually contribute to the overall theme of the story, because they view all of these things as a checklist of separate disconnected techniques that you're supposed to add to your story.

agree. i think the root of my objection is in feeling that 'plot' or 'story arc' as removed from character choice/motivation/circumstance is a fundamental misreading of drama, and that the broad terms that somebody like Whedon uses to talk about a – say – Buffy season arc – presumes the listener already understands that said arc is a reductive and incomplete term/conceit, but this is often not the case with popular consumers

I guess I see what you mean. although it sounds like that's getting into the whole "which comes first story or character" debate which is highly contentious and personal from the writer's point of view, and kind of irrelevant from the audience's point of view.