Is the Narrative Arc Pure Gospel?

Nope.

When I entered writing school, I didn’t know much about a narrative arc. I’d heard of it and little more. I began to attempt to apply it to my writing and to my reading. The more I studied it, the less sense it made.

The narrative arc is a symbol that represents the movement of a story. It classically looks like a Bell curve, sometimes like a triangle, and is usually divided into threes.

1. The first third of the line climbs. This represents a divvying-out of information and a building-up of tension.

2. The apex of the curve is the climax, or epiphany.

3. The final third, the decline, symbolizes an unwinding, or denouement, which means "outcome" or "conclusion."

For what it’s worth, the three-part hill abbreviates a five-part model that Shakespeare employed for dramatic action.

1. exposition

2. rising action

3. climax

4. falling action

5. resolution.

Don’t ask me to explain the difference. These days, English departments teach the three-part arc. I learned it at the University of Montana, in a class with William Kittredge.

Once I began to study structure, I realized that almost nothing I read fell into the perfect Bell-curve pattern of narrative arc.

For one thing, epiphanies happen quite often, in every scene, and so the arching line, I believe, should more aptly be wavy as it rises, not straight. It should be actually very wavy.

The main epiphany almost never happens in the exact center of the timeline. For me it mostly happens about two-thirds of the way into the story. For some reason, modern unwinding seems shorter, maybe because we moderns are less savvy about drama than the Elizabethans. Maybe we require more time to understand a situation. Maybe, once we understand a thing, we get out faster. Maybe we're less patient.

Some pieces, I've learned, lack denouement altogether.

In nature writing especially, a writer may present a problem for which no solution has been reached. This is why so many texts on environmental themes must rely on an interior landscape in which transformation of the writer becomes the epiphany.

I think the narrative arc should not be taken as gospel when it comes to writing. I hope I’m not making enemies when I say this, but I think it’s a historical artifact. Perhaps it was once useful, and perhaps—just perhaps—it’s a product of the Latinization of knowledge.

In the same way that we need to rethink all the ways of knowing that Greek and Roman cultures displaced, maybe we need to be open to the many, many dramas and stories where a Bell curve simply does not symbolize the movement of the story.

A number of books have looked at nonlinear patterns of prose, including:

• Shapes of Native Nonfiction, edited by Elissa Washout and Theresa Warburton

• Meander, Spiral, Explode, by Jane Alison