Beware the ShArcs!
All ShArcs are subplots, but not all subplots are ShArcs!
As part of the launch of Serial Nation, I am posting chunks of Become an Unstoppable Storyteller here, because serials and serializing are so much more than “posting a story in chunks.” I mean, it is definitely “posting a story in chunks” but also SO MUCH MORE!
Why “ShArcs”?
As I mentioned in the The Spreadsheet, this whole book started as a pop-up webinar I did with (then) Ream co-founder Michael Evans. I kept stumbling over saying “short arcs” and made a joke about calling them “ShArcs” and it stuck! My best friend has even suggested creating a shark mascot, which I haven’t…YET!
The concept of ShArcs might seem odd at first, but they are very simple plot devices: they are there to bridge the beats between the end of one season and the start of another.
The assumption is usually that the long arc will serve as the overarching bridge, to carry readers along in the serial even when an individual season reaches its conclusion. While that can be true, it also puts a lot of pressure on you as the writer to always make sure the long arc is front and center, even when sometimes it shouldn’t (or can’t) be. Long arcs have their own pacing and beats, and since that pacing is being drawn out over multiple seasons, there will be natural lags where it is simply simmering in the background. The longer the long arc, the harder you have to work to make sure everything is always dialed up to eleven.
A ShArc keeps readers invested in the story no matter where the season wraps up within the extended beats of the long arc.
So what is a ShArc, then? Simple: it is a type of subplot.
What you need to keep in mind is that every short arc is a subplot, but not every subplot is a short arc.
You can use secondary characters, side quests, side locations, and side situations for your short arcs, because anything that works as a subplot can be put into service as a short arc.
For example, let’s say your hero has a psychic alien cat she’s bonded with (you military sf fans will know who I mean!) and right before the climax of a season, the cat is kidnapped. The hero can’t just break off from the primary plot at such a critical point to go search for her cat, but it is a big emotional arc throughout the end of the season: she doesn’t have her psychic companion, and it makes her worried, especially since maybe she can “sense” that it is in danger, or scared, or lost. This is going on while the big space battle is raging, so readers are going to be invested in what is happening to the alien cat. Then the season ends with the hero flying away in triumph from the detritus of the space battle to go! Find! Her! CAT!
(If you do this, I guarantee your fans will be howling at you for the next season NOW, and that is honestly the best feeling in the world! Because we are authors and we love our cliffhangers, bwahahahahah!)
Season two starts with her embroiled in rescuing her cat, which can be part of the inciting incident that kicks off season two by introducing a new villain. And away you go!
That is a very simple example of how a short arc can carry readers into the next season, whether the long arc is able to do so or not.
The value of ShArcs is that they allow the emotional payoff of the season to wrap up in full while still dragging the reader into the next season and further along the long arc’s progress. The danger of ending a season with a cliffhanger tied to the season’s beats is that readers can become frustrated with the lack of closure. Instead, you are putting a lower-stake cliffhanger on offer that is important to the plot, or to the characters, but won’t leave the reader feeling like they’ve been bamboozled.
A great example of this is provided by John Gaspard, who wrote The Popcorn Principles: A Novelist’s Guide to Learning from the Movies. He talks about the Back to the Future series, and while this is not an example of a short arc in action, it does show the importance of wrapping up a season’s complete story arc (in this case, read “season” for “movie”).
The first movie ends on the high note of Marty McFly dropping back into the future (back where he started) to find everything changed for the better. All the loose ends and character arcs have been neatly wrapped up in a bow. If the movie had ended at that point, no one would complain. However, it doesn’t; Doc Brown shows up and explains to Marty that his future kids are in trouble and need their help. They jump into the Delorean and drive off into the sequel!
The sequel, however, ends on a wisp of a promise. If you don’t remember, Marty manages to undermine Biff (his nemesis) so that the terrible future of 2015 (I feel really old right now) never happens, but it is incredibly unfulfilling because nothing was actually resolved on screen. Marty did stop the future from happening, but in the meantime, Doc Brown has disappeared, which is the cliffhanger. Gaspard explains that this is a true cliffhanger that leaves viewers dissatisfied with the movie, because the emotional arc of the story is erased with the future reset to where it started in 1985 (oh, these timey-wimey stories!), with Doc Brown in some kind of unknown state and possibly in danger.
Point being, if you, like me, were sitting in the theater in November 1989, and the final installment of the series was not coming out until May 1990, you were pretty freakin’ annoyed. It was completely the opposite reaction I had to the end of the first movie. Did I go see the third movie, six months later? Of course I did (everyone did), but I felt pretty salty about it. No shade meant to those who love the second movie, but for me, it had simply failed on the last lap. (Not really sure how they could have done it differently, since the whole point was for Marty to change/erase the terrible future, but still, it was very unfulfilling.)
ShArcs help you avoid that kind of situation. If you can’t have Doc Brown busting into the very last scene of your story to drag people into the next season (and who can?), then a ShArc is a good stand-in.
I am often asked, though: are all ShArcs short?
No, they do not have to be short, but the point of a ShArc is that it is a tight enough narrative that it does not need to be broken out into beats to stay coherent for the reader (and the writer, to be honest).
For instance, in the psychic pet cat example I used above, the subplot is based on a complex relationship that spans most if not all of the story (the military officer being the story’s protagonist, after all, and she loves her psychic cat companion), but it is a very simple set up in and of itself: the cat mysteriously disappears, the military officer is worried about it throughout a bunch of climatic battles, then heads off to parts unknown to find her cat once the season is wrapped up.
You may have a subplot(s) that weave(s) through many seasons of a long arc; one may have its own beats that you could repurpose to use as a short arc.
A good example of this is the classic mentor arc, which is common in fantasy and LitRPG stories. The hero finds their mentor in the first act, usually goes through their training montage somewhere in the second act, and then, of course, the mentor dies heroically while protecting or defending the hero in the third act. The mentor’s story is a subplot, and you can mine it in multiple ways to explain the backstory (Obi-Wan Kenobi) or to develop world-building that the hero might not see or understand (Gandalf).
The ShArc might be the launch of the subplot itself, where the hero meets their mentor via some kind of side quest. If you state the need for the side quest right before the final climactic chapter of the season, then end the season with an episode in which the hero is on the side quest and, OH NO, FALLS INTO A TRAP! WHO IS THE DASTARDLY PERSON WHO BUILT THE TRAP? End the scene with a menacing character standing over our hero, who is then revealed in the next season’s first installment as the mentor who is testing the hero’s skills. Reuse and repurpose the mentor arc as needed as you go along!
While I’ve read a lot of serial stories in my life, I did not solidify my ideas around ShArcs until I was watching the greatest television show ever made, the Chinese drama Nirvana in Fire (2015). The episodes did not hold together the way I was used to with “(Western) TV show episode” beats, often ending abruptly in the middle of a quiet scene such as a couple of characters drinking tea. Yet, I could not hit “play” fast enough to get to the next episode!
I realized quickly what the director was doing: he started and ended dramatic story arcs in the middle of the episode. It is something I subsequently noticed a lot of longer Chinese dramas do, although I am not educated enough on the topic of Chinese narrative beats to know if this is a carryover from classic literary forms. (If anyone reading this knows something about that, please let me know!)
While those were not short arcs, technically speaking, it sparked the idea of starting an arc in the middle of a bigger arc in order to grab readers and pull them along to the next season of the serial.
In the case of Nirvana in Fire, the long arc is compelling, since it is about secret identities and betrayal and revenge and so, so much trauma. Yet, as keen as I was to see how the main character succeeded in his plans, there were so many subplots going on that it would have been easy to just get bored and fall out of the story completely once a subplot was wrapped up. Yet you can’t, because the subplots never end when an episode ends. To get to the end of a subplot, you must keep watching, no matter how quietly the episodes end and start, and no matter at what point in the long arc of Mei Changsu’s revenge that the episode sits.
One thing I want to stress here is that short arcs are not required for every season, and ShArcs should be short but can vary in length. Their whole, entire purpose is to serve as a bridge to carry readers from one season (or long arc) to another, so there is no One Right Way to Do It.
Sidenote: A longer subplot is also really useful for creating extra bonus scenes for your followers, or even launching off into a completely new but connected story (such as prequels, or giving a secondary character their own turn as a protagonist).
The posts here on Serial Nation Field Notes are always free! But it helps support my work by subscribing. ❤️
If you are an author who would like to go more in-depth on serials, serialization, and the subscription model for authors, join my growing community on Patreon for access to resources and more!
