Story arc: the six basic shapes
Every story moves its hero's fortune up or down. Pick an arc to see its shape, then compare it with the others in faint ink behind.
Man in a hole
Fall – rise
Trouble, then recovery. The most common shape in popular fiction; Vonnegut called it the one "people never get tired of".
In flash fiction: The default flash shape: a problem and its resolution in one scene.
Where the six arcs come from
Kurt Vonnegut proposed that stories have shapes you can draw on a graph, with good fortune at the top and ill fortune at the bottom. In 2016, Andrew Reagan and colleagues at the University of Vermont's Computational Story Lab tested the idea. They tracked the emotional words across 1,327 works of fiction from Project Gutenberg and found that six basic arcs account for most of them (EPJ Data Science, "The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes"). Their data also suggested that Icarus, Oedipus and man-in-a-hole stories were among the most downloaded.
Story arc vs plot structure
An arc tracks fortune, meaning how good or bad things are for the character. A plot structure tracks tension and where the key events fall. You can combine them freely: a man-in-a-hole arc told on a three-act structure, or an Icarus arc told on the Fichtean Curve. See all ten structures on the story structures page.
Character arc
A character arc is the inner change that runs alongside the outer arc: a positive arc (the character overcomes a flaw), a negative arc (they succumb to it) or a flat arc (they stay true and change the world around them). In flash fiction there is usually room for one small, precise change, such as a decision, a realisation or a gesture, rather than a full transformation.
Questions writers ask
What is a story arc?
The path a story takes from beginning to end, usually described either as a plot shape (rising action, climax, resolution) or as the emotional journey of the main character from good fortune to bad and back.
What is the difference between a story arc and a narrative arc?
In everyday use they mean the same thing. Some teachers use "narrative arc" for the plot structure and "character arc" for the inner change of the protagonist.
What are the six basic story arcs?
Rags to riches (rise), riches to rags (fall), man in a hole (fall then rise), Icarus (rise then fall), Cinderella (rise, fall, rise) and Oedipus (fall, rise, fall). A 2016 University of Vermont study of 1,327 Project Gutenberg books found these six shapes dominate.
Who came up with story shapes?
Kurt Vonnegut sketched "the shapes of stories" in his rejected master's thesis and later in lectures and in A Man Without a Country (2005). Andrew Reagan and colleagues tested the idea computationally in 2016.