Thunder and Story Arcs

As some of you may or may not know the NBA playoffs are going on right now, and I am a HUGE Thunder fan. Last year they made the playoffs as an 8 seed and managed to keep the Lakers on their toes for a good six games. This was unheard of. The Lakers held the championship from the year before, and the Thunder was barely two years old. This year they made it to the third round in the Western conference before being upset by the Mavs 1-4.

Blah, blah, blah, basketball stuff, right? No. This is interesting to me because it follows a trajectory that I see a lot in literature. Some might even say that it follows the ideal story arc! With stories, people often say that there should be a beginning a middle, and an end. While this is vaguely true, a more accurate story arc would probably go: Beginning, PROBLEM! Middle, PROBLEM! End (with the beginning and the end optional.) The purpose of this two-problem system is to keep the reader interested, to keep your characters in action, and to provide a reasonable amount of room for internal character change.

Let me give an example:

Beginning: girl is dateless on a Saturday night

PROBLEM: the terminator is after her!

Middle: running running, love stuff, kills terminator with pipe bomb

PROBLEM: OH NOES! Pipe bomb doesn’t work, Terminator is still alive!

End: girl goes to Mexico/is preggers.

Would this story have been the same had Kyle not died? Would it have been as exciting had the Terminator been killed by the first pipe bomb? Would we have had “I’ll be back” if Sara had been safe inside the police station? NO! We need lots and lots and lots of problems to overcome for a story to be interesting.

There is no such thing as a one problem story, or if there is, it’s probably not worth reading. Even in children’s books there are multiple story lines, take the Interupting Chicken: Problem one: little chicken won’t go to sleep, Problem two: what’s going to happen with the storybook? Problem three: what will happen when they get to the end of the story??

Multiple ups and downs are essential for a good story, and this is why I feel ok about the Thunder loosing to the Mavs. If the Thunder had just won the series, we would only have had a one problem story. Now, because of this loss, we have a two problem story, and the Thunder has the time and story arc necessary for them to grow as a team, grow as individual characters, and make their win next year that much more exciting.