Poetry 101: Narrative Arc

Take a second, close your eyes and think of the most recent poem that you wrote. Now think of it as a clothesline with laundry hanging on it. The laundry is the decorative elements of your poetry–the imagery, the metaphors, the very words, everything else you use to convey your point. The clothesline? That's the narrative arc.


In the context of poetry, I think of narrative arc as the balance of your guiding idea. Whatever you want to say with your poem. You could be telling a story, sure, but you could also be writing about an idea, or an emotion, or something you're not quite sure about until you actually write the poem. But whatever it is, it has to remain balanced.


Think of that clothesline again. It can't be strung too loosely, or it'll sag and dirty your clothes. It can't be strung too tightly, or it might snap if you hang something too heavy. It has to be thick enough all the way through, or it could break. You have to spread the clothes out evenly, or you risk breaking or deforming the line. And you need a clothesline in the first place, or you end up with nothing more than a pile of clothes.


Translate that to poetry, and here's what you need to have:

• An intention for how your guiding idea moves throughout the poem. If you're not entirely sure how your guiding idea functions in every bit of your poem, it's going to sag at some point under the weight of whatever language tricks you hang on it. But, it also needs some flexibility, some room to move. If nothing about your guiding idea changes throughout the poem, it'll start to constrain your writing. If you experiment, try and push a slightly fanciful metaphor on it, it'll snap and send everything cascading into the dust.
• Enough of your guiding idea in the poem all the way through, so that your reader can understand what's going on. If your idea breaks under the weight of language that's too flowery, or a metaphor that's too deep, your reader is going to come to that break in the clothesline and get completely lost.
• A relatively even balance of metaphor and other linguistic tricks all the way through your poem. Imagine that clothesline with a bunch of clothes all at one end and naked rope on the other side. It'd look pretty strange, wouldn't it? If you overload one part of your poem with language tricks, so will your poem. Also, you will force your narrative arc into a shape you didn't want, possibly changing the entire meaning of the poem.
• A guiding idea. This should go without saying, which is why I put it at the end, but you really do need a guiding idea to use throughout your poem. A pile of language tricks, while it might be pretty to look at, ultimately makes no sense without an idea to hold it up.

If all this sounds vague, that's because it is. The balance of your guiding idea is going to look different in each poem you write. In one, your clothesline might be thick and visible. In another, it might be relatively thin. Sometimes, all you need is a smattering of hints at your main idea throughout the poem.


For example, let's look at how the writers of Netflix's Orange is the New Black handle the Piper-Alex story arc in the very first episode of Season 1. For those of you who don't know a thing about Orange is the New Black, it centers (at least for the first few seasons) on an upper middle-class white woman, Piper Chapman, who goes to prison for being marginally involved, thanks to her ex-girlfriend Alex Vause, in an international drug ring. Years later, they find themselves in the same prison.


Since Orange is a TV show, it has many other story arcs which all play out over a very long period of time, so it's a little artificial to look at just one episode. But the first episode is a great example of how subtly you can hint at an idea without really expressing it. Alex isn't named in the first episode. We don't even learn that she's in the same prison as Piper until the last seconds. However, the writers keep showing her, or things to do with her, so much so that they're basically screaming, "Hey, pay attention to this person! She's going to be important!"


The third shot we see is of Piper and Alex in the shower. And, through flashbacks, we keep seeing the depth of their relationship. For example, when Piper is served her arrest papers, she tries to explain it away to her fiance by saying, "I was 22. I thought I was in love." Then she pauses, and says, "I was in love." We see Alex convincing Piper to carry a suitcase of money to Brussels. She only did it once, but that was enough to send her to prison. So, when we and Piper learn, at the very end of the episode, that Alex is in the same prison–she comes to say hello after Piper has had a very bad morning–and Piper lets out a scream, it feels like the logical end of the clothesline. If the writers had shown us Alex so much with no payoff at the end, it would have been like following an arc only to have it suddenly vanish into thin air.


Like the writers of Orange is the New Black, you can be subtle (and honestly, if you want a lesson in developing a story over a period of time, watch a season or two and track one plotline). You can have a narrative arc that's almost invisible under your choices with language and form. Or, you can have a thick, well-defined narrative arc running visibly through a poem. It all depends on your style and your subject. But, if you take anything away from this very long post, remember this: you must have a narrative arc, it must run all the way through your poem, and it must balance with the language and form of the poem. So go forth, write a poem, or dig up one of your old ones, and see if you can track the narrative arc through it!

Read more of Rukmini's fantastic writing advice on Floodmark.

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Poetry 101 is a series of posts written by the Floodmark editors following our White Elephant Poetry Contest during National Poetry Month. We promised to give every writer who submitted to our contest feedback on their work -- and we did! In the process, we found tons of inspiration for helpful posts on Floodmark. Are you just starting out in the poetry game? Are you dabbling? Are you stuck, frustrated, and looking for some idea as to why? Poetry 101 might just be for you. The editors have chosen something they noticed time and time again was holding great poems back from being great. Check back every Wednesday for a new post on a different aspect of the poem!  Let us know if there's something you'd like to see us tackle and we'll gladly have a go at it for you. If you're wondering it, chances are someone is asking the same question out there.