NEW PARIS BOOK IN PROGRESS IN 2025: EMOTIONAL ARC – Blog 34Up and down emotions … and yet it’s called an emotional arc …
An emotional arc is a character’s inner journey – how they go through change and grow by the end of the story. A novel’s strong emotional arc taps into universal emotions, like love, grief, regret, and hope as the character makes a transformation in life. For example, in the new Paris book, a character may need to either make a decision to stay or leave, or is forced to by bureaucracy or a dilemma, such as Brexit or the pandemic. Or maybe Paris was a stopover while the character figured out what to do next. Whatever the scenario, the character should learn something emotionally and transform emotionally. In either scenario, there should be a midpoint crisis – a choice or breaking point – or the character faces a major revelation. The character might be reluctant to change – what happens if, and when, the character resists change or resists “starting over.” What is the turning point – the resolution point, the point when action occurs? The endpoint could then be an internal realization of something – such as what “home” means or reflecting on the transformative process or reaching a long sought after goal. And that is the emotional arc – the term writers use. For me, the word “arc” seems incongruous or misleading because emotions fluctuate and don’t move in simple, smooth, rainbow-like curve. The reason the process is called an emotional arc is because, over the course of the story, a character’s emotional journey tends to have an arc shape when mapped out. Think of it not as a perfectly symmetrical curve but as a narrative shape that shows change over time. The term helps writers to “structure” emotional growth so that the character isn’t the same at the end of the story as they were at the beginning. Really, emotional growth looks more like a winding mountain path, or a spikey heart monitor response, rather than a clean, upward curve. The key is that by the end, there is a clear transformation, even if the road was rocky. I like to think of the emotional arc as a mountain climb, like a rocky, uneven adventure, sometimes exciting and sometimes scary due to falls, setbacks, back-tracks, good weather; bad weather, spurts of movement, and times of fatigue. I like to think of the emotional arc as a river, sometimes flowing smoothly and sometimes turbulent, and maybe – like during the pandemic – still and perhaps even stagnant. I like to think of the emotional arc as a spiral, with the character revisiting and repeating the same emotions, the same struggles, the same scenarios, seemingly getting nowhere but eventually cycling slowly upwards. Or like a tapestry, with threads of emotions weaving in and out of a character’s life, ultimately forming a recognizable pattern. Ultimately though, emotional growth is non-linear, and rather than a perfect arc, it is a progressive transformation on a road with detours, regressions, dead ends, surprises, shocks, thickets, thorns, roses, and open fields.
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Saturday, 1 February 2025
NEW PARIS BOOK IN PROGRESS IN 2025: EMOTIONAL ARC – Blog 34
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