Arcs and Branches

Big stories ... epics ... sagas ... trilogies ... have arcs and branches.  Arcs are sub-tales with their own beginning, middle and end, which start somewhere, develop in various ways, peak and work to some kind of at least semi-satisfactory conclusion.  Branches are points of divergence or departure within a story, where things which have developed up to the current point split and go off in different directions, with the reader not knowing where that particular new thread of the story will go. Branches and arcs are the ways writers introduce new currents of their tales, where branches may or may not find conclusions and become arcs or supporting parts of arcs, while arcs themselves, small or large, always find some kind of end.  Within a big arc ... the story of Character X ... there can be and usually are sub-arcs and even sub-sub-arcs that support the arcs above them, and give a sense of nested structure to a larger tale.  

That being said, I'm coming to notice in some of the serial novels I read that what I had imagined as the "arcs-within-arcs" structure of something like a trilogy was somewhat self-contained.  There was the (I assumed) BIGGEST arc of the trilogy itself, and the smaller arcs of each book in the trilogy, and within each book the arcs of the sub-books.  But it's not that simple.  In book two of a trilogy I'm reading now, near the end, they launch a branch that clearly won't be addressed within the trilogy itself, but most likely by a trilogy of its own.  Even this, I might have thought, could be part of a larger set of arcs making up something like a 9 volume "Saga", where each trilogy is 1/3 of a larger tale, all coming to conclusion by the end of the 9th book.  As the reader completes the 9th volume, all the arcs have found conclusion ... so I suspected.

In this, my initial sense of how things might be structured in such books, there is a delightful "beginning-middle-end" structure to the larger 9 book Saga, the constituent 3 book trilogies and each individual novel.  

But ... 

Some writers are very prolific, and their books number in the dozens.  Some such authors launch interwoven sagas, where one branches off another, not in a linear way, but perhaps more resembling a tree, where a core of characters and situations gives rise to multiple spin-off trilogies and sagas, until it would take quite a deft act of mapping to just keep track of how all the various bits of each tale relate to one another.  Such is life, so why not fiction, yes?

Why does all this matter to me, you ask? 

I'm about to launch a new world of story telling, with new places, people, things and events, and I know from past experience it will have many branches and arcs before too long, and I'm pondering how these various bits of the new world I'm creating will relate to each other.  Am I telling one long linear tale with many layers of matryoshka like nested stories and sub-stories, or am I launching a more tree-like reality, where each branch will eventually find its own end, but not necessarily by returning to the trunk? At this point, I can't certainly KNOW for sure, but my best guess is the latter.  

Life is ever-branching off in new directions, and I see no reason to think my stories won't do the same. Now that I see that, I understand how the introduction of some new branches will lead to entirely new sagas and epics, while others will remain within a given primary story line. 

How does seeing this help me?  

By understanding that some new branches may depart from the central "trunk" story arc and form more-or-less self-contained tales of their own, I can feel free to introduce within the trunk story different kinds of branches, knowing that not all of them need to be woven back into the initial trunk story. This also leaves the reader with a more open ended sense of these branches, not knowing which ones will reappear later and which ones may not.  All in all, this perspective leaves me feeling more relaxed about creating this new story telling universe and its many different tales. And I always write better when I'm relaxed.  Do you?