Back to the table

71 Structure Kr Kübler-Ross Arc Story Structures

Kübler-Ross Arc

The five stages of grief used as an emotional arc.

What it is

The Kübler-Ross arc is a character arc built on the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. You take those five words and use them as the emotional spine of a character who is living through a loss.

Here is the shape. Your character starts by refusing to accept that the thing has happened. Then comes rage, usually aimed at whoever is standing closest. Then the character tries to make a deal, with a doctor, with God, with a spouse, or with themselves. Then the fighting stops and the character sinks. Last, the character arrives somewhere they can live.

Writers who borrow the shape treat those five states as positions. The character occupies one, then the next, then the next. The payoff is a run of separate scenes across a long inner story, instead of one shapeless gloom from the first page of mourning to the last.

You need to hold two ideas about this arc at the same time. As science, the model is in bad shape. It came from interviews with dying patients, never from bereaved people. Bereavement researchers tested the sequence and rejected it. As a dramatic progression, though, it still works. Readers know the five words. Each word hands you something different to play. A journey from denial to acceptance is one that readers follow without effort.

Those are two separate questions, and arguments about the model nearly always mix them up. The first is accuracy: do the five stages describe what bereaved people go through? The research answer is no. There is no sequence, there is no universal set of stages, and several studies found the predicted order missing from their data. The second question is utility: do the five stages make a usable dramatic progression? Yes, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the first question. A shape can be false about the world and still be true to what readers follow.

Keeping the questions apart saves you from two mistakes. A writer who takes the model as proven science marches a character through all five steps and then defends the result as realism. A writer who hears that the model is discredited, and concludes that it must be useless, throws away a working arc. Neither mistake is necessary. A clearly drawn emotional ladder is a fine drafting aid, as long as you know that real grief climbs no ladder. Use the shape where it fits your book. Never tell your reader that this is how grief works.

Put simply: for a novelist, five separate emotional states are a gift. As a description of real mourning, they are poor. A character who walks through them in order looks like a chart, and nobody mistakes a chart for a person.

The model came from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist who held a post at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. Her book On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families came out from Macmillan in 1969. The problem she was solving was a clinical problem and a teaching problem. She was not thinking about stories, and she was not really doing research either.

Her foundation tells the story of how it started. In the fall of 1965, four students from the Chicago Theological Seminary asked her to help with a study of dying. Her suggestion was the one thing nobody was doing: ask the dying themselves. Every week, one gravely ill patient from a Chicago hospital sat and talked with her while students, nurses, chaplains and doctors listened. Afterward the group discussed what they had heard. Most of the book is transcripts of those sessions, printed at length. The current edition gives each of the five stages a chapter of its own, then a chapter called Hope, then one on the patient's family, then three more on the seminar and the treatment of the terminally ill.

Remember what hospitals were like in 1969. Nobody talked to dying patients. Often they were not told their prognosis. Their beds were at the far end of the ward. Kübler-Ross wanted a shared set of words, so that a nurse, a relative and the patient could all name the situation they were in.

The book helped start the hospice and palliative care movements. Its own preface, though, makes two disclaimers. The book is not a manual for managing dying patients, and the book is not a complete psychology of dying people. That disclaimer sits on page one of the very book that gets cited as the complete psychology.

So the origin is a ward's vocabulary. Its source was what dying people said about facing their own deaths. Its author was a doctor who wanted her colleagues to listen. She was not writing a theory of bereavement, and she was not writing a story arc.

Two things changed after 1969, and the second change often gets pinned on the wrong person. The first change was to the list. The chart at the back of the 1969 book shows ten overlapping responses, in this order: shock, denial, partial denial, anger, bargaining, preparatory grief, depression, acceptance, decathexis and hope. Only five of them are numbered. Hope is drawn underneath all the rest, running the full length of the chart. The famous five are a subset of that chart, never the whole of it. Then, in August 1969, three months before the book came out, a syndicated newspaper series ran under her byline, and the series gave five numbered stages in sequence. The foundation's account is that this short form was the one that spread. Both forms are hers, months apart. One of them traveled.

The second change was to the subject. The 1969 book has one chapter on the patient's family, which found the same responses in relatives, and that chapter was the seed. People kept asking her whether the stages applied to losses other than death. In Questions and Answers on Death and Dying (1974) she said yes. Patients losing their sight went through them. Young veterans who had been paralyzed went through them. The stages were identical for anyone losing something that mattered greatly. Bereavement was added formally in On Grief and Grieving (Scribner, 2005), which she wrote with David Kessler and finished shortly before her death in 2004. Kessler then added a sixth stage, meaning, in Finding Meaning (2019), with the family's permission.

So the popular version, a map for surviving someone else's death, reads the model back into a situation it was never built for. Her own extension did come, but by then she was no longer drawing a line.

One practical note before going on. The phrase "the five stages of grief" is a registered trademark, owned by the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Family Limited Partnership. One reason this table gives the craft version a different name is that trademark.

Her own caveats are the part almost nobody repeats. In the 1969 book she wrote that the stages last different lengths of time and that they "replace each other or exist at times side by side". Read that again. Weather changes like that. Staircases do not. The foundation adds a point about language. Kübler-Ross was a native German speaker, and the German edition, in print since 1971, uses the word Phasen. Phases can return. The German word for fixed, ordered steps is Stadien, the word used for staging a disease, and the German edition does not use it. The English word "stage" implies a staircase. Her chart implied none.

She kept loosening the model after that. In 1974 she described people occupying two or three states at the same time. In 1978 she redrew the model as interlocking circles, with no timeline and no order. In 2005, with Kessler, she wrote that the stages are "not stops on some linear timeline in grief", that some people skip stages, and that the order varies. Ira Byock, who wrote the foreword to the current edition of On Death and Dying, makes the same point: read the book and the strict staircase version shows itself to be a misrepresentation of her.

None of this changes the science verdict. The sequence still fails the test, as you will see below. But the strict five-step staircase that gets attacked is part newspaper summary and part retelling, fifty years of it between 1969 and the book's fiftieth anniversary in 2019. Her real position lives in the book, which is listed below.

Why it matters

Grief resists drama because it is a condition, and drama needs an action. A mourner wants nothing specific and pursues nothing. A character can sit in one state for two hundred pages while you add rain. The five stages give a novelist three specific fixes for that problem.

The first gift is variety: five things to play instead of one. A denial scene is a person insisting that this is an ordinary Tuesday. An anger scene gives the character something to aim at. A bargaining scene contains a negotiation, so it has stakes and someone across the table. A depression scene is a withdrawal scene, the default for most writers, and too thin to carry a whole arc by itself. An acceptance scene is a decision. Add them up and you have five kinds of scene where you had one mood. A hard middle needs little more than that.

The second gift is direction. The line of travel runs from denial to acceptance, and readers can feel movement along it, or feel its absence. Movement turns a situation into an arc, and the Character Arc page explains why that difference matters so much. The five stages are one route across the deeper machinery of inner life. Other pages cover that machinery: the inner fight on Internal Conflict, the damage underneath on Wound, and the gap between the goal a character declares and the one they truly need on Want vs Need.

The third gift is common ground with readers. They already know the five words. Say "bargaining" or "anger" during a developmental edit and nobody needs it explained. That shared vocabulary is useful even where the model is wrong, in the same way that a reader's instinct for three-act timing helps a book land whether or not the reader could describe an act.

The risk is that the arc turns into a diagram. Tidy progress through five stages makes a grieving person into a worked example of a theory. You can spot it from the signs: a chapter per stage, the previous state already settled when each chapter begins, anger never revisited once its chapter is over, and every other character on the same timetable. Readers have been bereaved, or have watched someone close to them go through it. They know at once that grief is not like this. They hold no opinion on stage theory. They simply remember that it came back, again and again, in no order, set off by a smell.

The remedy keeps the five states and throws out the queue. What goes is the rule that each state waits its turn. Run two at once. Bring one back after it seemed finished. Give a secondary character the same death to grieve from a different state, which is the most dependable source of conflict a grief novel has. Make acceptance cost something, so that it is never a mere arrival. Treat the five as a palette, colors you mix. Stop treating them as an itinerary, a fixed route taken in order.

Be exact about what the research found. A wrong claim could travel from this page into a real conversation with a bereaved friend. Start with the timeline, because stage models had evidence against them before anyone ran the famous test.

Wortman and Silver questioned the model in 1989. Camille Wortman and Roxane Cohen Silver published "The Myths of Coping With Loss" in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (volume 57, pages 349 to 357). They examined four widely held assumptions: that depression after a loss is inevitable, that distress is necessary and its absence is a sign of trouble, that a loss must be worked through, and that resolution should be expected. The available evidence failed to support those assumptions and in places contradicted them. They disputed, in particular, the idea that everyone arrives at acceptance.

The sequence itself was tested in 2007. Paul Maciejewski, Baohui Zhang, Susan Block and Holly Prigerson published the test in JAMA (volume 297, pages 716 to 723), using the Yale Bereavement Study: 233 bereaved people in Connecticut, all after natural deaths, followed for two years. Neither side's usual summary captures what they found. After rescaling, the peaks for the five indicators fell roughly in the order the model predicts. Unscaled, the data looked nothing like the model. Acceptance topped the endorsements from the first month onward. Yearning dominated the negative responses from start to finish. Anger and disbelief were minor players. Yearning is not one of the five, so the strongest signal in the data has no place on the chart.

Bonanno and Boerner answered the same year. George Bonanno and Kathrin Boerner replied in JAMA later in 2007 (volume 297, pages 2692 to 2694). Their argument: even with that study counted, stage theory still lacks sound empirical backing.

The field's settled view is blunter. Margaret Stroebe, Henk Schut and Kathrin Boerner wrote in 2017, in OMEGA — Journal of Death and Dying (volume 74, pages 455 to 473), that stage theory should be abandoned by everyone concerned, or at most kept as a historical footnote. Their grounds: mourners who fail to follow the stages are harmed by the expectation that they should.

The model is still taught and shared anyway. Charles A. Corr surveyed American textbooks in the same journal in 2020 (volume 82, pages 294 to 322) and asked whether the model should now be presented as history only, rather than as guidance for practice. In 2021 Kate Avis, Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut counted online presentations in Frontiers in Psychology. Of 72 websites about grief, 44 repeated the five stages, and endorsement was roughly double criticism. So the first version a writer meets is nearly always the confident one.

Hall's verdict comes in two words. Christopher Hall of the Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement reviewed the field in InPsych in December 2011 and called the model empirically rejected. In plain words: the evidence tested it, and it failed. What came after serves a novelist better than the model ever did. Hall summarizes George Bonanno's work tracking widowed people over time, which found not one path through grief but several distinct ones. Resilience was the commonest, at around 46 percent of participants. Chronic grief was 16. Recovery after common grief was 11. Depression followed by improvement was 10. Chronic depression was 8.

Two more shifts replaced the stages. The dual process model, from Stroebe and Schut in 1999, describes mourning as oscillation: the mourner swings between confronting the loss and carrying on with life, with no progression through states. Continuing bonds, from the 1996 collection edited by Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman, and from the work that followed it, overturned the earlier assumption that healthy mourning requires letting go.

Not everyone in the field reads this as total defeat for her. The American Journal of Bioethics marked the book's fiftieth anniversary in 2019 with an issue mostly about it. Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, a bioethicist, argued there that the variation later researchers found is exactly what her own call to listen more closely to patients invites. The findings answer her more than they refute her. Both things hold. She asked a good question. The answer she sketched failed the test.

No craft book owns this shape. It did not enter fiction through a named storytelling method, the way Story Circle and Three-Act Structure did. It arrived sideways, as a clinical vocabulary that writers found handy. Nobody answers for it as story structure. There is no authority to consult and no standard version. You work unaided.

Three kinds of loss fit the shape badly, and the first is grief that does not resolve. The arc ends in acceptance, and much grief does not. A parent who loses a child. A partner who is missing rather than confirmed dead. A relationship that continues in damaged form. Those are not failed arcs. A novel that imposes acceptance on such a case reads as consolation, and the reader wanted truth. If your ending is something other than acceptance, you need a model with a different terminus. The Resolution page covers the broader category of endings that close without resolving.

The second is a culture that mourns differently. The model is a Western, mid-century clinical description. Mourning is not uniform. In some communities mourning is collective labor on a calendar, with ritual obligations and debts to the group. The live question there is what is owed, to whom, and by when, and no one is asking which stage the character occupies. Bonanno gives a chapter of The Other Side of Sadness to Chinese mourning rites, and the comparison is instructive, which is one reason that book is listed below. When your novel's mourning belongs to a particular community, study its customs. The Culture page takes over from here.

The third is a loss that is not a death. Writers apply the shape loosely to a diagnosis, a divorce, the end of a career, emigration, a miscarriage, or a parent's slow decline into dementia. This cuts both ways. Her own 1974 extension to losses other than death means the name is not being misused. But distance from an actual death exposes the model's weakest point: it has nothing for a loss that is still in progress. A character going deaf has no finished fact to accept. Acceptance arrives in installments, over and over. There is no station on the arc for that.

Most writers borrow only part of the shape, and part usually works better than the whole. There are three common ways to do it: take a couple of stages alone, change the order, or use the vocabulary with no sequence at all.

Two stages can be enough. One common pattern jumps from denial straight to acceptance and leaves out the middle three, because the book only has room for the refusal and the surrender. Thrillers and crime fiction often isolate anger as the plot's engine. A revenge plot is an arc deliberately halted at stage two, and its question is whether the character ever leaves.

The order can change. All That Jazz puts anger first, as the example below shows. A novel can end on bargaining, with the character still haggling, which is bleaker and often truer. Depression can come before the death itself. Kübler-Ross described this anticipatory form, in which the loss has not yet arrived.

The words can work without the sequence. The most common professional use of the five stages is diagnosing a draft rather than planning one. If every mourning chapter feels the same, label each one with whichever of the five it sits nearest to. When eleven chapters all come back "depression", you have found the problem without committing to the model. The check costs nothing and ties you to nothing.

One caution covers all three. Unearned authority clings to the five words. In your private notes, harmless. Inside the book, grieving readers may meet a discredited model presented as fact: a therapist character explaining it, an author's note, narration announcing that this is stage two. Spoken by a character, the model is only that person's belief, and the novel keeps its freedom to disagree.

Real-world examples

A Monster Calls (2011): five states working hard and refusing to line up

Of widely read books, Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls is the clearest case of all five states working hard while refusing to form a sequence. The idea was Siobhan Dowd's. Cancer killed her before she could write it, so Ness wrote it, and Jim Kay illustrated it. Walker Books published it in the United Kingdom and Candlewick Press in the United States. In 2012 it won both the Carnegie medal and the Kate Greenaway medal. No other book has taken the pair.

Conor O'Malley is thirteen. His mother is under cancer treatment that is not working. A yew tree, walking, comes to the house at seven minutes past midnight. The monster tells Conor three stories, then demands Conor's own.

All five states are there, and none of them queues. Denial fills the bulk of the story, nearly to the end: Conor insists, to himself and to his grandmother, that the treatment will succeed. Anger comes early, twice, and both times it is physical. He wrecks his grandmother's sitting room, and he attacks a boy at school. Bargaining is aimed at the monster, which exists for that purpose. Depression arrives as nightmare and isolation together.

The ending gives away the book, so skip to the next heading if you have not read it. There is no serene acceptance. There is a confession instead. What Conor must finally say out loud is that in his nightmare he lets his mother fall, and that part of him wants the end to come, for her sake and for his.

The craft lesson: the last station is reached through the admission of an unbearable wish, with no calm in it anywhere. The states overlap, recur and coexist, and the arc still reads. Ness used the palette and ignored the itinerary.

All That Jazz (1979): the model named on screen, then lived anyway

Bob Fosse's film, co-written with Robert Alan Aurthur, is semi-autobiographical. Joe Gideon, played by Roy Scheider, is a choreographer with three things running at once: a Broadway show in rehearsal, a stand-up comedian's film in the edit, and the destruction of his own heart. In the film within the film, the comedian's routine takes Kübler-Ross as its subject. Her five stages are named aloud on screen. Gideon's hospital scenes afterward follow the comedian's list, with stages one and two exchanged: anger first, denial second.

The technique you can steal: the model becomes an ordinary object inside the story's world. The audience hears the pattern explained, then watches a man live it. Nothing is smuggled in as a claim about the way dying goes. A character cites the model and credits the source. The irony carries the point. Gideon has heard the lecture, and the sequence takes him anyway.

In a novel this works because most contemporary characters know the five stages. A character can acknowledge them, push against the timetable, then notice they are following it regardless. The reader gets a familiar shape. The page makes no claim that the shape exists in reality.

An everyday scenario: an organ builder going deaf in five tidy chapters

Picture a writer. Call her Isabeau Trett. Her draft, The Swell Box, runs a hundred and twenty thousand words. Its subject is Maurice Dimond, an organ builder in his fifties who is losing his hearing. Her critique group keeps giving her the same vague note: the draft feels schematic, a diagram rather than a story.

The group is right. In chapter nine Maurice tells nobody and takes a cathedral contract he cannot deliver. In chapter ten he shouts at his audiologist. In chapter eleven he tries remedies, all of them doomed, and privately vows to build one final instrument. In chapter twelve the workshop goes unvisited. In chapter thirteen he teaches his apprentice to voice a reed by feel. Every chapter is competent. Every chapter seals its state before passing the baton to the next. Anyone who has ever lost something will refuse to believe it.

Three changes fix it, and all five states stay. First, overlap: the shouting moves back to chapter nine, where the pretense is, so that concealment and fury live in the same man at the same time. Second, recurrence: denial returns after the withdrawal. In chapter fourteen Maurice quietly accepts another contract he cannot deliver, and the apprentice is the one who notices. Third, a concrete price at the last station: teaching by touch is an image, and an image is not a decision. It becomes a decision only when the cathedral hears, formally and on the record, that the job must pass to someone else.

Isabeau keeps the palette. Five separate states, a scene type for each. The strict order goes, and the arc gains from losing it. Her subject is a loss that keeps on arriving, and the tidy version could never hold that.

Try it yourself

Budget an afternoon, with the manuscript open and a notepad beside it. Every step is a question you answer on paper.

  1. Decide which question you are answering. Write one line: "I am using this because it fits my character," or "I am using this because it is how grief works." If you wrote the second line, change it. The model does not support that sentence, and your book does not need it.
  2. Label what you already have. Give every chapter in which the loss is handled a tag: the nearest of the five, or "none of these" if that is the honest answer. If all the tags come out the same, your middle sits in one mood, however varied the chapters look.
  3. Count the recurrences. Put a mark beside any stage that appears two or more times. Zero marks means you wrote the stages as a queue, each waiting its turn. Choose the one most likely to return, usually denial or anger, and bring it back late, when the reader believes it is finished.
  4. Add a second mourner who is out of step. Give them a different tie to the same loss and a different tempo. Two mourners on separate timetables grate on each other, and that is conflict at no cost. Nothing cures the diagram feel faster. The one-person version of this is internal conflict.
  5. Price acceptance as a decision. List the concrete act the character must perform to reach the end of the arc: something done, said, signed, surrendered or admitted. If you cannot name an act, acceptance is only a mood, and the ending will feel unearned. All Is Lost is the beat after which this decision tends to come.
  6. Write the unsaid sentence. In the character's own voice, write a single line about the loss: the thing they will not say. Find the page where it finally gets said. Then confirm that everything before that page is a form of not saying it. Ness does this with Conor. Structure gets easier, because you are managing one withheld admission instead of five states.
  7. Audit the assertions. Comb the manuscript for every spot where the five stages are stated as fact, whether by the narrator or by a character. For each one, decide whether the claim stays and whether anyone in the book pushes back. A model shown being believed is fine. Endorsement is a different matter.
  8. Read the researchers before you write the grief scene. Give one hour to one of the resources listed below. What you get are particulars that no stage list contains: relief, laughter, a smell that undoes someone eighteen months later, the back-and-forth between mourning and renewing the car registration. Those particulars are what put a person on the page. Bonanno's The Other Side of Sadness, also listed below, is the book to read if you want to write grief rather than diagram it.

Common mistakes and misunderstandings

Mistaking a dying model for a bereavement model. Her interviewees were terminally ill, every one of them facing their own death. The bereavement version came later, partly from her, in 1974 and 2005, and mostly from everyone else. A character mourning another person is using a borrowed tool. Know that it is borrowed.

Treating the model as live science. Wortman and Silver in 1989, Bonanno and Boerner in 2007, Stroebe, Schut and Boerner in 2017: abandoning stage theory is the mainstream position inside the field, with no contrarian edge to it. Never tell readers, inside the book or outside it, that grief does these five things.

Treating its rejection as proof that the shape is useless. This mirror-image error is just as common. Rejected as science does not mean useless as structure. As a drafting tool, five separate states with a direction are sound. The caution on this page exists because the shape misdescribes something real, and for no other reason. The shape does not fail dramatically.

Attacking a rigidity she never held. In 1969 she stated overlap and recurrence. In 1974 she described two or three states at once. In 1978 she drew circles with no order. In 2005 she wrote that there are no stops on a timeline. The strict staircase you may want to attack is mostly a newspaper's digest of her, and mostly not her.

Writing one chapter per stage. Each state resolved before the next begins, and none of them returning. A bereaved reader stops believing the entire sequence, for reasons they cannot name. Recurrence and overlap are not decoration. They are the line between a chart and a character.

Leaving out yearning. Yearning is nowhere on the list, and the data put it first. Across the two years of the Yale Bereavement Study it was the chief negative response. The model gives it no station. An arc of grief with no missing in it, no phone reached for, no second place laid at the table, is incomplete whatever else it contains.

Confusing acceptance with closure, and treating closure as owed. The arc ends in a livable state, which is not the same as a feeling resolved. Good loss novels often stop short of acceptance on purpose, and the data agree with them: arrival is far from universal. Refusing acceptance at the end is a legitimate choice and a structurally sound one.

Letting one character diagnose another's stage. The same carelessness shows up in dialogue. A character who tells a grieving character which stage they are in is doing the very thing the research warns against, and actual people have been harmed this way. Fine for a scene. Poison if the novel appears to endorse it. The novel should always know more than the character does.

Related elements