A story depends on how you slice it.
You can choose where each story begins and where it ends. You can decide what story you want your life to make.
There are many stories within the course of your life, and there can be alternative stories depending on the different meanings you choose to give the events.
Shaping an experience into a narrative arc helps you discover new meanings and hidden significances of your life. How you track, order, and select moments, how you choose where it might begin and where it might end, will determine the story you tell.
Every story has an arc from where you were to where you are, the challenges along the way, the hurdles, and how things culminated with a change, a transformation—sometimes big, sometimes subtle. This evolution of change is known as the narrative arc.
A narrative act usually includes three elements. You can think of it as the shape of a checkmark:
- The status quo
- The dip
- Achievements of new heights
At the beginning of the story, your life moves merrily along the status quo. Then something happens.
The dip is where you encounter a challenge or conflict.
As you find a way to overcome the conflict, your story moves out of the dip into a transformation, a renewal. Most importantly, you’ve upped the ante, achieved new heights. In some way, life now is better, more meaningful; you feel stronger, softer, wiser.
As you explore what the trail of events might mean, and how it all culminates, you’ll write the kind of story that makes people weep, and laugh, and keep turning the pages. You’ll write a story that transforms experience on the page, and in doing so, your reader will be transformed as well.