I was explaining some ongoing stories in Star Trek: Voyager to my mom, and I referred to them as story arcs. She asked me why I called them story arcs? I couldn't think of a reasonable answer to this question, so... fill me in. By the way, an arc is a curved line, so how does that relate to an ongoing story spanning a series of stories?
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Why do ya'll call it a "story arc?"
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The curved line is the right approach; it's about visualizing the development of a story. Character goes from beginning (A) to crisis (B) to action (C) to resolution (D).
In terms of the first Star Wars movie, for Luke Skywalker A is being a farmboy, B is hunted by stormtroopers, C running around the Death Star and helping the princess, and D is him becoming the hero of the Rebels by destroying the Death Star. You can visualize this as an upward 'arc', from humble beginnings to great and grand endings.
But it applies to any direction, up or down, to anything that develops from point A to B to C and so on."A society grows great when old men plant trees, the shade of which they know they will never sit in. Good people do things for other people. That's it, the end." -- Penelope Wilton in Ricky Gervais's After Life
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