The chapter sorts arcs by what happens to the criterion, since that is what a writer can find and change on the page, and sorts the means of carrying a theme by how far each one argues. The two lists are related: the kind of arc a book gives its protagonist decides which carriers its theme can use.
Five arcs
The conversion arc
The criterion changes once, at a single priced decision, usually late in the book. Before the hinge the character chooses by the old rule, and the cost of doing so grows; at the hinge they choose by a new one, and afterwards the old rule no longer governs. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (2021), read in Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2), is a pure case: Bill Furlong chooses throughout by what keeps his household safe, and on Christmas Eve walks a girl out of the convent’s coal shed towards his home, choosing by what was once done for his mother. The conversion arc suits a book whose question can be answered by one act. Its risks are the free hinge and the scheduled arc in Failure Patterns: a conversion that costs nothing, or one the reader saw coming from the first chapter.
The staged arc
The criterion changes in steps, or the change is recognised at one point and acted on at another. Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), read in Worked Analyses, gives its heroine a recognition after Box Hill and an action on the new rule the next morning, and later a second recognition about herself that changes a different set of choices. The staged arc suits long novels, because a single hinge spread over five hundred pages leaves long stretches in which the character only waits for it. Its risk is the one Scene and Sequel’s criterion test (Chapter 2) names for hinges set close together: the arc is spent too fast, and the last third of the book has nowhere left to go. A staged arc whose stages are recognitions without decisions is a refused arc that has not admitted it.
The falling arc
The criterion is replaced by a worse one. The descent usually proceeds by decisions each of which is defensible on the old rule, so that the character never chooses to become worse and becomes worse by choosing. Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972), read in Worked Analyses, protects his family at every step, and the protection becomes the thing he had wanted no part of. Macbeth is the canonical case, and Weiland’s fall and corruption arcs, set out in How It Works, are both forms of it. The falling arc carries the strongest dramatic irony of the five, because the reader can see the destination before the character can. Its risk is the opposite of the conversion arc’s: a descent with no point at which the character could have chosen otherwise reads as fate rather than fall, and the reader stops judging.
The steadfast arc
The protagonist’s criterion holds under pressure designed to break it, and the change happens to others, who come to choose by it. The pressure must be real: the character must be offered the old world’s terms, with something to lose by refusing them. Paul King’s film Paddington 2 (2017), read in the full treatment, sends its bear to prison for a crime he did not commit, and it is the prison that changes. Weiland calls this the flat arc. The steadfast arc is the usual form of the series hero, whose criterion must survive into the next volume, which is Series and Genre’s subject (Chapter 17). Its risk is that a criterion never truly tested reads as stasis, and the book becomes a demonstration of a virtue rather than a trial of one.
The refused arc
The character reaches the hinge, sees the decision the new criterion would make, and chooses by the old one. The change is in recognition, not in choice, and the recognition is the arc’s climax. Stevens in The Remains of the Day (1989), treated in The Ending (Chapter 16), sees on the pier at Weymouth what he gave up, and turns at once to the problem of learning to banter; Lee Chandler in Manchester by the Sea (2016), Scene and Sequel’s exception (Chapter 2), is offered the chance to stay and says he cannot beat it. The refused arc recurs in literary fiction, as the cases from Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2) and The Ending (Chapter 16) show, and its condition is that the recognition be on the page and cost something, since a refusal the character never sees is a static character, not a refused arc.
Four carriers of theme
A theme is carried by four means, which differ in how far they argue. They are listed from strongest to weakest as argument, and the order has a reason: a carrier argues to the degree that the reader has felt a cost attached to it.
The first carrier is the decision. What the protagonist chooses at the hinge, against a cost the reader has watched grow, is the book’s verdict on its question, and the reader accepts it as a verdict because they have weighed the price with the character. The second is variation: other characters answer the same question differently, so that the book’s answer is one among several and is tested against them. Truby’s moral argument depends on it, and The Subplot’s thematic counterpoint (Chapter 14) is the form it takes between threads. Variation argues only if the opposition holds an answer the book takes seriously; a straw opponent is variation in name only. The third is the motif, which carries the theme by recurring in changed contexts, as the household’s ledger passes from the father’s hand to Dov’s and then to all three children. A motif shows that the question persists and where its weight lies, but it cannot argue by itself, since an object answers nothing. The fourth is statement, a character or narrator saying what the book means. It is the most explicit carrier and the weakest as argument, because it asks for assent rather than earning it, and at an ending it borrows the authority of the last position that The Ending (Chapter 16) calls privileged. Statement works where the narration has been stating things throughout, as in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, or where a character’s statement is one answer among several that the book goes on to test.
The hinge: a ruling
Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2) proposed the hinge as a seventh beat of the scene–sequel unit, and its Core chapter presented it instead as a property that a decision may or may not have. This chapter adopts the hinge at the scale of the book, as the point at which an arc is located and the place a writer looks first when an arc fails, and rejects it as a seventh beat. Three findings support the ruling. Most decisions have no hinge, so a beat that is usually absent is not a beat. The hinge is inferred rather than seen, by comparing a decision with the decisions before it, so it belongs to the shape of a book rather than to one unit of it. And two of the five arcs above, the steadfast and the refused, have no hinge by design. The objection the ruling does not answer is that a falling arc, and some staged arcs, change by erosion, a series of small accommodations none of which is the turn. Lydgate’s decline in Middlemarch is built that way, and in such books the hinge may be an analyst’s construction laid over a gradual change. The chapter concedes the objection for arcs of erosion and keeps the hinge as the test for arcs of decision.
See also: the full treatment, with the five arcs related to Weiland’s in a table, a note on the disillusionment arc, and arcs shared across an ensemble.