A friend of mine is a fan of absurdist, surreal literature; Daniil Kharms is a name that I particularly remember and a play involving two characters called Pushkin and Gogol falling over each other. If I remember rightly the only words in the play are the two characters names that they take turns to bellow at each other in frustration about the other getting in the way and tripping them up. Not everyone's cup of tea btu it really engaged my friend. From a commercial point of view, I guess that there are market niches for most things and fashions too. I'm not sure if Kharms has ever been fashionable, but he must have fans and there must be publishers that have tapped into a market for that kind of thing.
Bit late to chime in - I've noticed some deviations in modern storywriting from that formula. Most common is a "false ending"; eg, when there's rising action leading to a climax, falling action - but the falling action is reversed into rising action again, and the story is given another climax. Specifically prevalent in film series where they can cut off an episode at the point where action begins to rise again, thus teasing the next climax. So yeah, that's a story with a beginning, a middle, a fake end, another middle and a true end. I also feel falling action has gone down the drain, especially in cinema. The last chapters of LOTR mean to tie up ends and I loved the "small conflict" in the Shire that contrasted the world-ending-destiny-changing-struggle the characters fought before. Nevertheless, the movie adaptation cut it - and even though they did that, people still found the falling action & the end very long for Return of the King. Blasphemy though; it was a true ending to a long story and many character arcs. Situation's the same for Harry Potter; I really prefer the discussions at the end of the books and the short "way back home" scenes to tie up the story over what they did in the 4th movie (climax, evil reveal done - roll credits!). I recall Hamlet having a really short "end" part, but my recollection is foggy (it was /waaay/ back in high school). Most Whodunit? crime fiction have their climax scene and cut it there (when everyone gathers and the murderer is revealed).
Yep. Just about everything Cameron has done. False ending when we thought the Terminator had perished in flames, but then he rises and is now a gleaming steel skeleton to begin the real climax. Same thing in Aliens. We think it's over and the danger averted until the Queen unfolds her legs from inside the landing gear compartment and cuts Bishop in half. Heck, I guess it happened in the original Alien too—Ripley rescued the cat and they boarded the escape pod and she strips down to her skivvies thinking they're all safe now, when suddenly the alien wakes up and notices her. Not sure I'd qualify the false ending as a different kind of story structure though, it's really traditional 3-act narrative form with the gimmick of a false ending.
Didn't specifically mean the "WAIT - THERE'S MO- roll credits" kind of false ending, but the preferred "theatric curve" featured in most superhero movies. Action rises into a climax-confrontation with the big evil, where the protagonist loses. Falling action follows and the protagonist admitting their failures - only to find some rejuvenation / sudden twist / sudden reinforcement which then pushes the action back on track for a climax, after which the falling action is very, very short (basically, the end of the movie). What is the "climax" of Cameron's Avatar? Surely, a classical analysis would put it the moment "Eyva answers" and the animals arrive to defeat the humans and their war-machines. The falling action is Quaritch's demise and the ending is Jake's "ascension/transfer". Another analysis could place the climax at this moment. Even more, you /could/ end the movie soon after. The tree falls, the Na'vi flee. Jake is removed from the machine & his team is arrested by the humans. He is detained in the human base while the humans begin exploiting the Unobtanium from the mine. The movie ends with Jake contemplating his actions and humanity's morale while imprisoned. Roll credits! There's even a fair argument that the conflict /was resolved/ in the story. Up until the tree's fall Jake's conflict was his split dedication between humanity and the Na'vi. That conflict is resolved at that point, because he abandons humanity and opts to side with the Na'vi. A new conflict blossoms there, which is about revenge & removing the humans from the planet. The rising action starts with the escape from the human base, escalates into re-union with the Na'vi and then union between all tribes. This is the conflict that's resolved in the final climax / battle. Hope that explains my "theory" or "view", this idea of a double-climax and two interlinked arcs. Not saying it is good or bad; merely that it's been a fad in Hollywood at least.
It's still the traditional narrative form though, just with one (or more) of the turning points raised to seem like the final climax. Just a narrative stutter at the end. Narrative (the 3 act structure or a variation of it) is the way the human mind works to make sense of events. We narrativize our lives, and at various points in time we re-narrativize the same events in different ways, in order to make sense out of what essentially is nonsense. Otherwise we live lives with no meaning and that leads to nihilism and depression and there's no point to living anymore. I suppose there are nihilistic stories that deliberately avoid or negate narrative. I know there are, but I don't know of any offhand. McKee does list many. He divides story into 3 categories—there's traditional narrative and the variations of it, there's what he calls Minimalism, which still follows narrative form but minimizes it so it doesn't really feel like standard narrative, and there's Anti-narrative, which deliberately breaks the rules and creates that artsy, edgy dark nihilism. .Minimalism and anti-narrative are creatures of the Independent market in the movie world (which is what he's mostly dealing with). Stephen King says he doesn't plot his best stories, he just starts with a 'situation' (repressed outcast high-school girl gets horribly bullied by her mom and the kids at school, and develops telekinetic powers, leading to a bloody massacre—Carrie) and just writes intuitively. But he also knows how to plot, so you could probably find some version of the narrative plotline in all his best stories, unless he wandered off and got lost in a whiskey-fueled bender and doesn't even know what he wrote. Those aren't the good or successful stories (at least I seriously doubt any of them are). It would be interesting to try to find successful stories that somehow avoid or negate narrative form. My own studies into that world led to Theater of the Absurd and Surrealism, which are both Anti-narrative, part of the Modern experiment in destroying form for the sake of being hip, edgy and cool and trying to feel profound. But there's little there that ended up being successful outside of a small group of fans. Minimalist stories tend to work far better than anti-narrative, but they still have at least some kind of narrative, though it might be twisted or hidden deep.
Unless you're talking about the beat generation. Then that's exactly what it is. Highly successful, but not my thing. There are many many irregular story forms and arcs out there to choose from and attempt. The traditional arc is the gold standard, but is not by any means a necessity. I'll do just a few examples here to show. Non-traditional/non-linear story arcs (roller coasters really) fall into what many critics consider the greatest literary authors works. Take Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 for example. This story isn't even really a narrative arc. It never completes. It just builds tension until a breaking point, which is the thematic theme. Narrative entropy is the purpose of the entire novel. It plays the reader by curving up in tension, commenting obscurely on the reader's condition, and leaving you hanging at the top. Brilliant and infuriating. Or take this pair of novels: Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted and Suzanne Scanlon's Promising Young Women. They both take very cyclical narratives that cycle back through their history to coalesce their present situations and accept who they are to move forward (or not). The novels are written outside the concept of narrative time that instead draws the reader into memories attached to emotional states. In shirt form you have authors like Jorge Borges from Argentina who frequents non-traditional narrative arcs. The most famous example is "The Garden of Forking Paths," which actually develops its form through reassignment of charcter roles in multiple dimensions through different mediums. Incredibly complex and a perfect example of what would be considered a labyrinthian narrative. It's inescapable by its characters because all times exist simultaneously. These are just a couple examples. Non-traditional arcs are highly successful and everywhere. There is no necessity tied to traditional arcs.
Thanks Mingo. You're definitely right, and I think there's a lot more leeway in writing, especially at the more literary end of things, than for movies (which was really Mckee's main focus). Honestly, for the first example you gave, it sounds like just a modification on traditional narrative. That's the kind of thing I meant when I said (I forget how I worded it) something like bending or stretching traditional narrative. But the others do sound different. I've seen the movie of Girl, Interrupted, but not read the book. But from the movie, I suspect it's what he would call Minimalist, where if you look deep enough there's actually a narrative structure closely based on the traditional, but modified in various ways, but it's deeply hidden. In fact for a lot of stories that seem to be plot-free I'll bet this is the case. But I'm sure there definitely are very non-narrative stories that are highly successful. There's a form I call Poetic (for stories I mean, not poems) that's close to form-free but still manages to get across a satisfying arc of some sort, usually what I've heard referred to as an 'emotional through-line'. If you have that, you can get away with almost no structure as long as you can work poetically. And there's what I call Poetic Narrative, a blending of the two. It would fall under what McKee calls Minimalism. I did a write-up about a Japanese film that I consider a perfect example of Poetic Narrative on my blog: A Study of Fires on the Plain (1959)—director Kon Ichikawa. In fact the first 2 pages or so of my blog here are dedicated to my studies into poetic form and how it relates to narrative.
I actually forgot a very important one: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It uses a very non-traditional story line that takes five separate stories by five separate timelines, tells half their traditional story arcs in the first half in succession, then reverse orders them for the second half. They coalesce into a bizarrely complicated understanding of each other through different timelines or mediums. Beautiful book. The movie is also my all-time favorite. Movie adds an extra layer that all the characters are actually the same throughout the atlas, playing different roles at different times, yet knowing they've encountered each other before. Different sprt of take on destiny.
Here's a post from my blog where I started to understand much better how to create what I call poetic narrative, or how to make completely non-narrative story work (at least this is one way): These are 2 vitally important ideas I took from the Theatre of the Absurd book that I don't think were mentioned in the last post. They seem to apply to the larger world of poetic story: 1 - By the end of the play the viewer has enough information to assemble the poetic image. The poetic image is not visual—it's the sum total of the situations and ideas of the piece. When taken as a whole they reveal the central theme or themes of the work. This isn't quoted directly, just paraphrased as well as I can remember it. So, this is what you get from poetry, as opposed to narrative's storyline, plot, drama etc. When it's over you ponder it for a while and try to get the feel for what it all means, and certain themes and ideas will emerge, and then maybe a few that were more subtle. This is more like contemplating a picture than watching a movie. 2 - You don't need a story as long as there's an emotional through-line. This one blew me away when I understood it. Actually I think an emotional through-line is a sort of story, though not in the traditional sense. Just a series of emotions and responses that, taken together, seem to end satisfyingly–not necessarily for the characters, but it completes something like an arc for the reader/viewer or what-have-you.
One of my favorite TV series, Babylon 5 had a story arc lasting years, it was wonderful. Other good Sci-Fi like Star Trek does not have a real arc just a "Continuing Mission." So I view the Story Arc as a super wonderful thing but not an absolute necessity.
