Beyond the Narrative Arc
Not every story builds to a climax. A writer explores the many shapes memoir and nonfiction can take—and how to choose the structure that fits your story.
Next month at Narratively Academy, Kristina R. Gaddy is teaching a new session of our popular Advanced Craft Workshop: Finding Your Structure, in which writers explore a few nontraditional story structures and zero in on which one is right for them. For today’s StoryCraft piece, we asked Kristina to share a little about why thinking beyond the narrative arc is sometimes needed.
“I want to know more about your writing process. How did you go about compiling, discerning what to include, and how to structure your book?” the moderator, Austenne Grey, asked me and Mark Stieler, my fellow panelist at the Southern Festival of Books.
I was there to talk about my new co-authored book, Go Back and Fetch It, while Mark was speaking about his newest Johnny Cash book, The Complete Johnny Cash: Lyrics from a Lifetime of Songwriting. We had both already shared stories about why we wrote these books and how our previous books had left us with unanswered questions—questions we hoped these books could answer.
When Austenne asked us about process, I immediately thought about structure—because I think about structure a lot.
“I often remember something that one of my mentors told me,” I said. “Chronology is your friend.” In nonfiction, we are dealing with the truth, with real events, and it is often simply easiest to move from the earliest thing that happened to the most recent. Both Mark and I had structured the books we were discussing this way.
What I didn’t say was that sometimes chronology is your friend—but you need something else, too. In writing, people often talk about the narrative arc—developing the story, the rising tension, the climax, the release. As classic as it is, I love Jane Alison’s take on this structure: “But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no?”
Even though Alison’s book Meander, Spiral, Explode analyzes structure in fiction, her ideas about different structures work for nonfiction, too. This basic arc isn’t how our lives work. They’re filled with ups and downs, times that seem to plateau, and maybe even a spiral or two—and they don’t end when the book ends. It would be surprising if we could make every nonfiction book follow an arc.
I believe that nonfiction books strive to answer a question (or questions), and we have to figure out how to formulate that answer.
In the opening to Beth Macy’s new book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, she writes: “Something was happening to our beloved hometown that didn’t quite fit the pat explanations offered by economists and sociologists… How does a community lose contact with its faith in schools? And what happens when it does? … What happens when the middle class vanishes…?”
Her book is chronological in a way; she spends a year back in her hometown from 2023 to 2024, trying to understand the community there. But to answer her questions, she braids together three strands: her childhood and the opportunity education gave her; her current relationship with her siblings and the people she grew up with; and the story of a recent high school graduate, Silas, whom she considers to be the 2025 version of herself. Tensions come and go, but the story isn’t built to move to a single point and then resolve (everyone’s lives will go on after the end of the book, after all).
Instead, the weaving creates the meaning. We see how Silas is both different from and similar to Macy, and how her conversations with her siblings and friends—and her research—explain why and how things have changed since she left her hometown in the 1980s. Through this braiding, we understand what happens when a community loses faith in schools and the impact of that on the middle class in America.
Memoirs that deal with internal questions and personal discovery might be better suited to a spiral, where we travel farther inward until an answer is revealed. If we are writing an essay with many facets, perhaps we meander toward the answer(s). Maybe tension and relief happen again and again as we struggle with the same problem in wavelets. Or perhaps we build ideas like blocks over the course of a piece so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
And that’s the thing—there are so many ways to structure a piece that are not a narrative arc, and often they serve our story better.
Want to go deeper?
In Kristina’s Advanced Craft Workshop: Finding Your Structure, you’ll explore a range of alternative story frameworks—from braiding and spirals to modular and collage-style forms—and apply them directly to your own work. Whether you’re stuck in a draft or starting something new, this class will help you unlock the structure your story actually needs.
