Academy Arc

[Gray_Mann]

How in the world do you write an academy arc? I have plots and plans and ideas and whatnot, but the only way to get to where I want, is an academy arc....but wow. I've read some of them in other works. They can be bad. Very bad.

Any suggestions? Or maybe some resources to help me get past this?

 

[Juia_Darkcrest]

Time skips, short scenes that advance the story, training time, maybe have a few scenes as relationships develop.
Im kind of doing something similar right now, though my MC is faculty at the school, not a student.

Unless your story's focus is academic life, time can rapidly progress now. You really don't want to write about every time he opens a book, listens to an instructor for an hour, has lunch and chats with fellow students about... that is nothing important.

Just summarize what is happening, maybe add a few challenges they are facing, sprinkle in a few scenes where the story develops and move time forward.

 

[ConansWitchBaby]

What everyone else does. Ignore the academy.

 

[Lmae]

For me, the mc goes into the academy to prevent anymore deaths at the school. Going there to learn how to control his powers is secondary.
If his main purpose was to learn how to control his powers, I would just skip it and use flashbacks.

In Nano Machine, the goal of the academy was for the mc to get allies to help him in his revenge quest and to go up in rank. So the main focus was him getting allies and helping them get stronger. There were time skips.

I read one story, that treated the academy as a self taught prison, because the mc was conscripted as a magic user. There were not classes and the students were expected to teach themselves. Students have access to the library and lab. Every week a teacher would give a student two assignments. If you fail both of them, it is over. These assignments can be as easy as to killing a small bird or as hard as capturing a runaway student. If you succeed, the teacher will award you with something, it could be a spell, knowledge, or an item.

It depends on the story you want to tell.

 

[KennyCelican]

How in the world do you write an academy arc? I have plots and plans and ideas and whatnot, but the only way to get to where I want, is an academy arc....but wow. I've read some of them in other works. They can be bad. Very bad.

Any suggestions? Or maybe some resources to help me get past this?

I'm not sure about an Academy arc. I've written something where the first couple Volumes are focused on the MC attending an Academy, and later she returns as an instructor, but I wouldn't call any of them an Academy 'arc'.

When I think of an 'arc', I'm thinking of a story arc, a sub-story within a larger whole. Having a 'training arc' makes sense, and calling it an 'Academy arc' I guess would fit, but the trouble is that training is usually pretty repetitive. Which means you'll want, as others have said, to focus on what the MC is doing at the Academy, why they're there, and the moments of their training where things come together, where they learn new details that change the paradigm in some way.

Do not, except maybe as a one-line 'class was normal today' setup / filler line, go into any kind of detail on each and every nigh identical day.

Just my 2c.