The overall shape of your story's journey from beginning to end, tracing the rise and fall of tension, conflict, and change.
A narrative arc is the overarching path your story takes from its opening situation through escalating conflict to its resolution. Think of it as the shape you would draw if you mapped your story's emotional intensity on a graph. Most narrative arcs follow some version of a rise-and-fall pattern: things start in relative calm, tension builds, a crisis hits, and then there is some form of resolution. But the beauty of narrative arcs is that they come in many shapes, and the shape you choose fundamentally changes how your story feels to read.
Understanding narrative arc gives you a bird's-eye view of your story. When something feels wrong in a draft but you cannot pinpoint why, it is often an arc problem: the tension plateaus, the resolution comes too early, or the emotional trajectory does not match the story you are trying to tell. Thinking in terms of arc helps you diagnose structural issues and gives you a vocabulary for talking about story shape with other writers.
A textbook rise-and-fall arc. The love story ascends through the balcony scene and secret marriage, peaks with the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, and plunges toward the tragic ending.
The arc follows Andy's slow descent into apparent hopelessness, building tension across decades, before the triumphant escape reveals that the arc was secretly ascending the entire time.
A deliberately unconventional arc that defies expected structure. The climax happens offscreen, the protagonist dies unexpectedly, and the story trails off rather than resolving neatly.
Both seasons have beautifully shaped arcs. Season two rises through the forbidden romance with the Priest, peaks at the confession scene, and resolves with the heartbreaking bus stop farewell.
If your arc plateaus in Act Two, you need to raise the stakes. Each major scene should push the tension higher than the last, or shift the nature of the conflict to keep it feeling fresh.
Plot is what happens. Narrative arc is the shape of how it happens. Two stories can have similar plots but completely different arcs depending on pacing, emphasis, and emotional trajectory.
Complex stories have many arcs running simultaneously, but one should be primary. Make sure the reader knows which arc is driving the story forward and give it the most structural weight.
Take a story you have already written (or a favorite novel) and draw its narrative arc as a line graph. Mark the x-axis as time and the y-axis as tension. Plot the key moments and connect them. Then compare the shape to the arc you intended. Where does the shape sag or spike unexpectedly? Use those observations to plan one structural revision.