I mentioned before that the webcomic Girl Genius features my current favorite fictional female character, but there’s more to the series that I happen to like. One of those elements is how it helps illustrate one of the harder concepts in writing fiction, the fractal nature of storytelling. One of the key structural elements of fiction (at least in the western tradition) is the narrative arc (also known as beginning-middle-end) which is essentially a tool to allow the writer to know when the story ends, and the audience to know where the climax occurs. Raise a problem in the beginning, resolve it (or its consequences) in the end.
One of the harder concepts in fiction to illustrate, and to implement consciously (though almost all writers can do it subconsciously) it the idea that the narrative arc structure is repeated down through every level of a good story. You have it in every chapter, every scene, every exchange of dialog, every paragraph, and, in the most heightened prose, every sentence.
When the arc is missing from a scene, it feels flat, unnecessary, static. When it is there, the scene is almost a story unto itself. Girl Genius, by nature of its serial format, publishing three pages a week, and also by nature of it being very well written, produces a great example of how this works. If you read it as it comes out, a single page every couple of days, you see that each page is structured as a micro-story starting with an initial problem and ending with some resolution that is also a complication that hooks into the next page (generally what people mean when they say “cliffhanger.”) However, if you go back and read several pages in sequence, you see larger arcs that cover several pages and the beats ending each individual page are less obvious.
Comic writing, like scriptwriting, is a quite different form than prose, but like scriptwriting, much of the dramatic structure is applicable to all forms of storytelling.
