Breaking the Arc. Loops, fractals, and fragmented storytelling

This is not where stories are supposed to start. But here we are, already in the middle. Already unsure of what’s been left out.

Already in motion. Without direction.

Which is how most of us move through the world now, isn’t it? Scroll by scroll. Echo by echo. Brand to brand to brand.

Linear storytelling would like to offer you a clean beginning.

But there is no clean.

You thought this would be linear, didn’t you?

The traditional story arc promises comfort. It gives you a setup, a tension, and a payoff. A nice symmetrical curve to rest your logic on. But the stories that stick lately spiral, glitch, and fold into themselves.

You don’t follow them, you fall into them. Like Everything Everywhere All At Once. A film that explodes plot into pixels and grief, and rebuilds itself in love, absurdity, and google eyes.

No center. No end. No resolution. And yet you emerge from it feeling more held than any neat three-act, because not all meaning is found in sequence. Some meaning finds you in the fragments. There’s no one way in, no last page. There’s only recursion.

Your customer doesn’t arrive at your “About” page, move to your “Services”, and then click “Buy”. They start with a reel. Get distracted. Come back via a friend’s testimonial. Open your email. Forget it. Return in the middle of a breakdown. End up binge-reading your blog at 2am. Decide to work with you because of a metaphor you dropped in an Instagram caption two months ago.

That’s the loop.
That’s the pattern.
That’s the new arc. Or rather, the old shape we’re just beginning to remember.

The small reflect the whole

Fractals don’t behave. They repeat, but never the same. They expand, inward.

Take one piece of your brand. A subject line, a tagline, a tweet. Zoom in.

Does it reflect the whole story? Does it contradict it? Is it just a hook? Or a hologram?

Liquid Death sells water, but every part of it from the mock-metal merch to the sarcastic sustainability tells the story sideways. No single narrative, just a recurring pattern of defiance.

A brand that doesn’t move forward. It echoes.
The story loops.
The story loops.

And this sentence has already happened.

Once upon a glitch in the algorithm

Where does a brand begin? With a blog? A product? A panic attack and a Canva free trial?

Glossier was once Into The Gloss. And also, a waitlist. And also, a drawer of lip balms in a stranger’s bathroom. The audience never entered from the same point. And that was the point.

Your brand doesn’t have a singular story. It has a constellation. Not memoir, memory. Out of order. Out of sync. Yet still, coherent, because we don’t remember in chapters. We remember in pulses, in images, in sharp lines of dialogue we didn’t know were important until they returned.

Just like this one:

This is not where stories are supposed to start.

And then…?

Don’t answer that.

Don’t tidy the arc. Don’t sew up the tension. Don’t give the guy a breakthrough just because he smiled and winked at you on camera.

What if resolution isn’t honest anymore?

What if your audience already knows how it ends, and they’re not looking for closure? What if they just want to recognize themselves… mid-sentence?

Sometimes the most ethical story you can tell is one that admits it doesn’t know where it’s going. Sometimes resonance lives in the unfinished.

Sometimes the loop doesn’t close. And it all becomes more real because of it.

Choose your re-entry

There’s no conclusion here. Only a choice.

Read your About page again.
Does it progress? Or does it mirror something you’ve said, and meant, before?

Take one line from your last post.
Hold it up like a shard of stained glass. Tilt it. See if the whole pattern flickers through.

Find the moment your story made sense.
Now fracture it. Start before. Or after. See what new center emerges.

We end where we didn’t begin

A repeated image.
A line you didn’t know would loop.
A pattern you sensed but couldn’t name.

The arc has been broken. But the story is intact.
No neat bow. No climb, no drop.
Just another return to the middle.

Where the real stories live.

Where they always have.

This blog is part of the Arc Series. Next, we’ll be putting the arc in a box, but that takes about a month to come out. Wait, or don’t. Like any good loop, you don’t need to start at the beginning. Read the next one, or the first one. Or the one that barely mentions arcs at all.

The story doesn’t mind. It was never linear to begin with.