Story Arc: What It Is, the Six Shapes and Examples

A story arc is the shape a story makes from beginning to end: how things go up and down for the main character, and where they finish compared with where they started. Rise and fall, fall and rise, or something more tangled, the arc is the line you would draw if you graphed the story's fortunes page by page.

The term is used in two ways. Writers use it, as here, for the shape of a whole story, and "narrative arc" means the same thing. In television and comics it also means a storyline that runs across several episodes or issues. Wiktionary's definition covers both: "The chronological construction of a plot or storyline, especially one specific to a particular character or plot aspect; an extended or continuing storyline in episodic storytelling media such as television or comic books."

This page covers what a story arc is, the shapes it usually takes, and how to find the shape of your own book. The shapes come from two primary sources, checked in the original: Kurt Vonnegut's own account of his rejected thesis and his lecture on the shapes of stories, and the 2016 study that measured the arcs of 1,327 novels.

What Is a Story Arc?

Picture a graph. Time runs left to right, from the first page to the last. Fortune runs bottom to top, from disaster to happiness. Each scene moves the main character up or down. Join the points and you have the story arc.

Vonnegut drew it exactly that way. In A Man Without a Country (2005), which prints his lecture on story shapes with the blackboard work in brackets, the vertical line "is the G-I axis", good fortune at the top and ill fortune at the bottom ("Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here"), and the horizontal line "is the B-E axis. B for beginning, E for entropy."

That graph is the whole idea. A story arc isn't a list of events. It is the movement those events make.

What Are the Parts of a Story Arc?

The diagram most people learn at school has five parts:

That five-part diagram descends from Gustav Freytag's pyramid of 1863, though Freytag's own names are different and his climax sits in the middle of the story, not near the end. His version is set out on Freytag's Pyramid. Most novels today follow a shape closer to the three-act structure, with the big turn near the end.

Treat the five parts as one shape among several. They describe a story that climbs to one peak. Plenty of good stories don't.

What Are the Six Types of Story Arc?

In 2016 a team led from the University of Vermont's Computational Story Lab measured the emotional arcs of 1,327 books from Project Gutenberg's fiction collection. Andrew Reagan and his co-authors scored the mood of the words in 10,000-word windows sliding through each book, then grouped the resulting lines. Their paper, "The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes" (EPJ Data Science, 2016), reports "broad support for the following six emotional arcs":

The names are the paper's own. A few details from it are worth knowing:

• The closest examples are not famous ones. The books whose arcs fit "Man in a hole" best were The Magic of Oz and Children of the Frost. Romeo and Juliet came eighth on the list of tragedies.
• The simplest shapes were not the most downloaded. The authors found "'Icarus' (-SV 2), 'Oedipus' (-SV 3), and two sequential 'Man in a hole' arcs (SV 4), are the three most successful emotional arcs", measured by downloads from Project Gutenberg. They add that a few very popular books inside each group pull those figures up.
• An emotional arc is not a plot. The authors are clear on it: "The emotional arc of a story does not give us direct information about the plot or the intended meaning of the story". The same falling line can come from very different events.

What Did Kurt Vonnegut Say About the Shape of Stories?

The idea that stories have shapes you can draw is usually traced to Vonnegut, and he did claim it, in his own words.

The thesis. In Palm Sunday (1981) he wrote that his master's thesis in anthropology for the University of Chicago "was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun. One must not be too playful." He added that "The thesis has vanished", so what survives is the summary he kept in his head: "The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper". He also argued that the shape of a society's stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.

The lecture. The version printed in A Man Without a Country names its shapes. The first is Man in Hole: "The story is 'Man in Hole,' but the story needn't be about a man or a hole. It's: Somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again." The book then draws Boy Meets Girl, Cinderella, a Kafka story and Hamlet.

Hamlet is the shape that resists the graph, and it leads him to his larger point: "The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is."

Which Story Arc Claims Are Wrong?

Several claims about story arcs travel from blog to blog without the sources behind them.

• "Vonnegut identified six story shapes." He didn't. The six come from the 2016 Vermont study. Vonnegut's printed lecture draws its own set. The paper cites Vonnegut's Palm Sunday and his recorded lecture, and calls one of its six "Vonnegut's 'Man in a hole'".
• "Here is Vonnegut's rejected thesis." The popular diagrams come from his lecture and from A Man Without a Country. In his own words, the thesis itself "has vanished".
• "The B-E axis means beginning to end." In the printed lecture it is "B for beginning, E for entropy."
• "Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution are Freytag's terms." Freytag wrote introduction, rise, climax, return or fall, and catastrophe. Some guides also list in medias res as a type of story arc, but it is a way of opening a story, not a shape. Starting in the middle changes where the reader joins the arc.

Story Arc vs Plot vs Character Arc

The three get mixed up because they describe the same book from different angles.

E. M. Forster drew the line between plot and a plain sequence of events in Aspects of the Novel (1927): "A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality." His example is the king who dies, then the queen who dies of grief. The grief is the plot.

A story arc sits on top of the plot. It asks not what happened but how it felt to go through it. A character arc is the inner version: a woman can end a story richer and lonelier, so her fortune rises while her inner arc falls. The common patterns for that inner change are set out on character arc types.

Can a Book Have More Than One Story Arc?

Yes. A novel usually has a main arc and several smaller ones running under it. A subplot has its own arc, and the art is in how it rises and falls against the main one. That relationship is covered on how to write a subplot.

A series has arcs at two levels: one for each book and one for the series as a whole. Each book needs its own arc that closes by its last page, while the series arc stays open until the final book. This is the sense television and comics mean by "story arc".

Story Arc Examples: One Story, Three Shapes

Here is an original mini-story. Ines takes over her late father's bakery in a seaside town. Score each beat from -5 (ruin) to +5 (joy):

Now watch where you start and stop decide the shape:

• Beats 2 to 6: Man in a hole. Trouble, then a way out. A warm, satisfying book.
• Beats 1 to 6: Cinderella. A rise, a setback, then a bigger rise. The early success makes the fall hurt more.
• Beats 2 to 7: Oedipus. Trouble, recovery, then a worse fall. The same events now read as a book about what she didn't know.

The events barely change. The arc does, because the first and last beat decide what the reader feels at the end. That is why the arc is worth choosing on purpose: it is the promise you make in chapter one and the feeling you leave on the last page.

How Do You Plot a Story Arc?

1. Decide the ending's fortune first. Is the main character better or worse off on the last page than on the first? That one answer narrows six shapes to three.
2. Find the turns. Count how many times the direction changes. One change makes Man in a hole or Icarus. Two makes Cinderella or Oedipus.
3. Place the biggest turn. A three-act novel saves its biggest turn for near the end. A tragedy in Freytag's mould peaks in the middle.
4. Score every scene. Give each a plus or a minus. Long flat stretches are where readers put a book down.
5. Check the opening against the ending. The first chapter sets up the arc the reader expects. If it opens a story about a debt, end on the debt.

How Do You Plot a Story Arc in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app for Windows, macOS and Linux. Its Outliner shows the documents in a folder as index cards, each with a synopsis, and its Timeline lays events out in lanes, one lane for each plotline.

See the shape in the Outliner:

1. Open the Outliner on the Draft and add a card for each scene with Add › Scene.
2. In each synopsis, write what happens and whether the main character ends the scene better or worse off.
3. Make two labels, "Rise" and "Fall". The pencil beside Status in the Inspector opens the Metadata Manager. On its Labels tab, type each name under Add New Label, pick a colour and click Add.
4. Set the Label on every scene.
5. Switch the Outliner to List View and read the colours top to bottom. Fall, fall, rise, rise is a man in a hole. If the colours never change for a dozen scenes, that stretch is flat.

Lay the arcs on the Timeline:

1. Click Timeline in the menu bar.
2. Click Add Plotline and make one plotline for each arc: the main plot, one character's inner arc, a subplot. Once the first exists, the + (Add plotline) at the top of the Timeline adds the next.
3. Use a plotline's Add existing chapters/scenes button to lay your chapters out on it in order, or its + (Add event) to open New Timeline Event in the Inspector, where you give the event a Title, a Start and its Linked chapter/scene, then click Create Event.
4. Open Timeline settings and, under Periods, click Add period for each stage of the arc: Setup, Rising action, Climax, Resolution. They sit above the lanes, so you can see which arc is doing what in each stage.
5. Switch to Story order to see the events as the reader meets them, a column per chapter.

The Outliner is also where you move a scene when the shape sags.

Common Mistakes

• Treating the five-part diagram as the only arc. It describes one peak. Cinderella and Oedipus have two turns, and a tragedy only falls.
• Confusing the story arc with the plot. A list of events is not a shape. Score the scenes and look at the line.
• A flat middle. Long runs where nothing gets better or worse. The scoring step finds them.
• Starting the arc too early. Beat 1 of the bakery story is only worth including if its rise makes the fall hurt.
• Ignoring the ending's direction. The last turn sets the reader's feeling. Change it and you change the book.
• Quoting Vonnegut for the six arcs. The six are Reagan and colleagues' (2016). Vonnegut drew his own shapes.

Sources

Retrieved 1 November 2026.

• Andrew J. Reagan, Lewis Mitchell, Dilan Kiley, Christopher M. Danforth and Peter Sheridan Dodds, "The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes", EPJ Data Science 5, 31 (2016), doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0093-1; full text on arXiv:1606.07772. The six arcs, the 1,327 books, the 10,000-word windows, the download finding and the plot caveat are quoted from this text.
• Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (Delacorte, 1981), the rejected thesis passage, read through Open Library's search inside (archive.org).
• Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country, ed. Daniel Simon (Seven Stories Press, 2005), the shapes-of-stories lecture: the G-I and B-E axes, Man in Hole and the Hamlet passage, read through Open Library's search inside (archive.org).
• E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Edward Arnold, 1927), chapter V, "The Plot", read through Open Library's search inside (archive.org).
• Wiktionary, story arc, the definition and the synonym narrative arc.
• Gustav Freytag, Freytag's Technique of the Drama, tr. Elias J. MacEwan (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1894), for the names of his five parts.