Notebook to Narrative 02
Emotional Arcs, Themes and Foundations
By crafting your story layer by layer rather than just writing it, you improve your creative efficiency because you eliminate any chance of writing yourself into a corner. You never lose sight of the forest, even when describing a single tree.
Your research and the ‘what if?’ spell should have suggested storylines and plot points, perhaps even more than you expected. Maybe you can’t decide which one offers the most — or best — story.
Don’t panic.
The Six Emotional Arcs
There are specific emotional journeys that inform the vast majority of fiction — six of them, in fact. Below is a link to an article I wrote describing them (at the bottom of that piece is a link to a downloadable, printable .pdf file to use as a reference). At the bottom of this piece is a link to the original study that determined the six arcs.
You may have some idea already as to who your protagonist is, but if you do, they should be loose, as in malleable. Sometimes it’s better (and easier) to find the emotional arc that best suits a storyline and then think of a protagonist.
Let your characters define themselves.
I have never had any success creating my protagonist first and then finding a story for them. Trust that your story will define your hero. In due time you will see I’m right.
In ‘Rushing the Rapture,’ Keddah is my antagonist but it is a slow revelation. Initially, he seems to be a supporting character (albeit an important one), and my antagonist is a rival — a successful — televangelist to my protagonist. Regardless, Keddah deserves his own emotional arc.
Keddah’s emotional arc is termed ‘Icarus,’ because his strategy to force the Rapture succeeds until the very last, when it fails.
You’ll notice that each pair of emotional arcs has a positive and a negative version. There is a third pair I haven’t used here, Mode 1. This pair are simple slopes — ‘rags to riches’ and ‘riches to rags’ — but they are no less useful than their more convoluted siblings.
Just because each pair of emotional arcs include a positive and negative, don’t think that your antagonist’s arc must be opposite to your protagonist’s. And you should try and assign emotional arcs to your support characters, but I will revisit this later.
Keddah needs a patsy for his strategy and I need a protagonist. Enter Elijah Storm, pastor of the Church of the Last Judgment, a devout televangelist who implores his viewers to repent and prepare for the Rapture for half an hour each Sunday on public access television. Elijah wants nothing more than to be God’s right hand on earth — or as successful as his rival, who just bought his second jet.
Elijah’s emotional arc is ‘Cinderella,’ where he becomes more successful than his rival but is then forced to abandon it in his effort to thwart Keddah, which he eventually does. He rises, falls, and then rises again.
Compare each of your potential storylines with these emotional arcs. Either one of them (and perhaps more) will align with this idea or that one, or you will see how to adjust your storyline to bind it to an emotional arc.
It’s not difficult but it does require you to think about your idea in all of its permutations. It is not a waste of time, and you will come away with a better understanding of your craft.
Sifting your Theme
Your protagonist’s emotional arc should suggest your primary theme. Faith is too broad and too vague, so what might better reflect his journey? Success. He sees success as being the physical tool of God’s Will, but he is tempted by the material success of his rival. Elijah’s emotional arc is to find material success, which distances him from achieving his dream of facilitating God’s Will. Eventually, he realises material success is fool’s gold in comparison to being successful in God’s service.
Elijah moves from talking the talk to walking the walk of his faith through determination and sacrifice.
The relationship between Elijah’s emotional arc and the theme of his strength in faith is the story’s blueprint which will inform the challenges that teach and change him so he can achieve his goal.
Already, there are character attributes and personality traits suggesting themselves. Elijah is probably shorter than he’d like to be, and definitely not handsome — not TV handsome, anyway. Maybe he has really bad teeth. Yet these are cosmetic deficiencies easily remedied by wealth from success.
His fiery faith suggests a rural, economically austere upbringing where trusting in God’s mysterious ways was a security blanket, but it also plays into his desire for material success.
My story requires two antagonists, though. The reader must think of Elijah’s televangelist rival as the antagonist until it becomes clear it is Keddah who is the mastermind. So may I introduce Joshua Cardinal, the dashing, charming pastor of the Divine Message, who locates his sermons in exotic, supposedly sacred environs, who shows his congregation the schools they built in Africa, and who justifies needing his two jets to fit in all of his work on God’s behalf. His Aston Martin and his Lamborghini are both white, to honour The Almighty.
Story Foundations
Every story needs a location, a time period, and specifications for any deviations from reality and the laws of physics. It’s fine to tweak the world, but you must apply your change consistently and consider the knock-on effects.
Too many writers imagine an alien world or fantasy continent for their tale but don’t think their world ‘rules’ through. Even Tolkien wasn’t perfect, though when he composed The Lord of the Rings, there was room in the reader’s imagination to accommodate elephants five stories tall. Not so, today. Modern readers demand more justification and greater rationale.
The same applies to social organization. Regardless of cultural attributes, most people will be normal — if everyone’s special, no one is.
In ‘Rushing the Rapture,’ Keddah is the only special character, so far he is somewhat divine — his six siblings have their own (severely depleted) powers, but nothing like Keddah’s. I have some leeway with him since he was the first ‘prototype,’ and perhaps God trialled certain ‘abilities’ with Keddah that He decided against going forward.
Keddah’s plan to breach the Portal to Perdition (Hell) requires an army, not to mention a sample of God’s blood. The blood is easy — leeching God is out of the question, Keddah’s siblings have been rendered unsuitable from their experience in the flood and Keddah would never use his own, so he has fathered a son whom he plans to sacrifice when the time comes.
And the army? Keddah poses as an angel to recruit Elijah as Herald of the Rapture, setting Elijah on his path as a prophet able to call on God to take the truly deserving straight to heaven — to Rapture. Thus, random members of his audience glow more and more brightly then disappear.
Does Keddah have the ability to ‘teleport’ people from one place to another? What if he merely has skills honed from experience which allows him to approach his target unseen, and then by distracting those around him and his victim with a manufactured light source, he is able to render them unconscious as he carries them away? Something to think about.
Unfortunately, his victims’ destination is not God’s embrace but a small cabin on a cargo ship in the harbour where they are stripped and bound to a gurney. Then they are branded with a symbol to facilitate possession by a demon and caged in the hold to await the voyage to Greece.
Here, then is a new sub-plot that needs a solution — what is the background to Keddah’s ‘deal with the Devil’ that enables his access to demons for his army? Hint: It has everything to do with Joshua Cardinal.
The Raptured, though, may not be numerically insufficient for his needs, so perhaps there must be a second stream of victims. Joshua Cardinal earns his credits in spades here, but he is also, perversely, somewhat of a victim in Keddah’s scheme.
The Bad News: Since the outset of 2023, Medium has seen fit to dramatically reduce the distribution of my articles. I believe it has to do with my personal politics, but that changes nothing.
I will upload this article and the next few to see if these re-ignite my viewing numbers, but I suspect they will not.
Nevertheless, I think I shall focus my future efforts on substack.com, where I may combine my stories with a forum to answer questions and regular opportunities to chat.
My newsletter on substack.com is titled ‘What’s Your Story?’ and is free to subscribe to, so please, try it out. Your voice will be heard, your opinions will help refine and improve the experience to make us better storytellers of us all.
ps. I tried to add the link, but couldn’t make it work. It’s easily found if you look, though.
Next: ‘Notebook to Narrative 03: Structure and Story Beats’
The link to the study:
