finding your arc

(or how to plot a story)

About ten years ago, I started writing a novel. I loved writing scenes and characters, and I imbued my story with lots of humour (much of it fairly juvenile), which was such a wondrous release given that I spent most of my time writing po-faced academic articles. But 12,000 words in, I abandoned my novel and left it to gather dust for a decade. Why? Because I didn’t have a plot.

Now I’ve picked up that fledgling novel again. I know much more about the craft of writing now, and having read all the ‘how to write’ books, been to umpteen masterclasses and online courses, taught creative writing for several years, and actually written and published a book, I realise that I just didn’t know the formula. In fact, I didn’t know there was a formula.

And one thing I discovered, during the writing of my memoir, is that the formula for fiction writing is equally useful when structuring any other writing form. In this post, I’m going to outline the key features of any narrative arc.