5 ms·

At the Blackboard: Kurt Vonnegut diagrams the shapes of stories (2005)

146 points by homarp 8y ago

homarp 8y ago
An infographic version http://www.mayaeilam.com/2012/01/01/the-shapes-of-stories-a-kurt-vonnegut-infographic/ http://www.mayaeilam.com/2012/01/01/the-shapes-of-stories-a-...
iaw 8y ago
There's an excellent video where he goes through these [0], worth a watch if you have the time. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc
davidw 8y ago
> I have just demonstrated to you that Shakespeare was as poor a storyteller as any Arapaho. What do the Arapaho have to do with any of this?
- elefanten 8y ago
  It's a callback to the section about "primitive peoples" and their supposedly flat stories.
hirundo 8y ago
I wonder if there's a decent correlation between the Vonnegut diagram of a movie's protagonist and the movie's box office. I'd guess that flat and monotonic downward curves are at a disadvantage, an upsloped ending an advantage. But you might be able to find interesting things about the number and intervals of minima and maxima, etc. It'd be interesting to look at the magnitude of the peaks and troughs too, but how would you calibrate the x axis across movies or between scenes? If it works you could be as successful in Hollywood as Raffles, the barefoot executive.
- jfoutz 8y ago
  There are a few. The AA advertisement up in the air, the counterfeiter catch me if you can, and Sophia copala’s lost in translation all spring to mind. Not smashing successes, but sort of light stories about nothing when nothing happens. Getting the same effect with gravity is harder. Precious might fall in that category.
- goto11 8y ago
  Oh yeah, basically all successful manistream movies follows the same dramatic model with standardized plot points designated "inciting incident", "midpoint", "point of no return" and so on. You are not going to revolutionize Hollywood with this insight. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure I think Vonnegut is actually satirizing this and saying truth is more important than dramatic structure. Popular fiction tend to have very clear dramatic curves, but Vonnegut is saying real life is more ambiguous.
  - sacado2 8y ago
    I am really amazed at how much we talk about that 3 act structure. Basically, it says, well, you have a beginning, and then a middle, and then the story ends. Not very helpful for writers, and it is not even descriptive. If only it told you "well, your first third is the beginning, next third middle, last third ending", but no. Actually, the second act is usually twice longer than each other, as shown in the wikipedia article, and it is usually cut in two parts, as there is a huge event in the middle ("No, I am your father"-kind-of-event). OK, so, basically, you have 4 acts, right? Why not call it a 4-act structure? And you still don't know how to structure them. OTOH, I like Lester Dent's famous master plot formula, written in the 30s for pulp fiction short stories: https://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html https://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html . It is written for action-packed short stories, obviously, but describes pretty well the structure of most Hollywood successes, too. And it can help writers, well, write interesting stories (although it must be adapted, obviously, unless you are writing a "must defeat the villain" story).
    - goto11 8y ago
      "Tree act structure" does not just mean that a story is split into three parts. At least as used by screenwriters, it is a term for a tried-and-true narrative structure with a lot of well-defined elements, for example that the protagonist should get a goal in the beginning which transform into a deeper personal goal, that stakes should increase and the protagonist have their deepest core challenged and so on.
    - thanatropism 8y ago
- egypturnash 8y ago
  Realistically this kind of work has already been done. It’s usually not described in these terms but there is a lot of analysis of What Works in the field of screenwriting manuals. “Save The Cat” is one that’s really narrowed in on What Sells. It’s not about what makes a “great” movie, it’s about what makes a movie that makes a good profit, and it’s kind of hilarious how much that book conflates profit-making films with great films. I recommend reading it with a very cynical eye as to what biases it’s author has before you go taking it as gospel.
2bitencryption 8y ago
I have no clue what Vonnegut's speaking voice/manner is like, but I read this with Feynman's voice, and it worked very perfectly.
- mjrbrennan 8y ago
  Here is a video version of it so you can hear! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ
blackzeppelin 8y ago
I learned this in a creative writing workshop and now I can't never think of a story without these guidelines. Every story each time fits into one of those descriptions, even the things that I write somehow end up being a shape of a story as described by Vonnegut. I find it very helpful but at the same time exasperating.
palad1n 8y ago
I had the great fortune of seeing him do this live, back in the last millennium. The best one had to be Kafka's "Metamorphosis".
- ArrayList 8y ago
  I think that warrants a more detailed account of the story... do tell?
ryanchoi 8y ago
In 2016 people analyzed a bunch of fiction and these trajectories showed up: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07772 https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07772 Articles about: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601848/data-mining-reveals-the-six-basic-emotional-arcs-of-storytelling/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601848/data-mining-reveal... https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/the-six-main-arcs-in-storytelling-identified-by-a-computer/490733/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/the-s...
- pfd1986 8y ago
  Is that the same idea behind Campbell's "The Power of the Myth"? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Myth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Myth
- beautifulfreak 8y ago
  The arxiv paper holds a link to the hedonometer, where all books in Project Gutenberg have been mapped. http://hedonometer.org/books/v3/1524/ http://hedonometer.org/books/v3/1524/
  - jonnydubowsky 8y ago
    I love the "per word happiness shift". I could totally see an ill-conceived startup offering a quantified self analysis tool... "with our handy all-day surveillance via your phone, we will analyze every word said by or to you and help you understand your per-word happiness shift!".
nsomaru 8y ago
As an aside, I always thought that Polonius’ advice to Leartes is excellent, and certainly did not read it the way Vonnegut implies.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
andy_ppp 8y ago
I highly recommend The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut - little read compares to his other books but fantastic Sci Fi IMO.
- staticautomatic 8y ago
  I've read most of his books and think The Sirens of Titan is arguably the best.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  I love that (well, and Breakfast of Champions) so much I could never get into his other novels much, because they're not them. Sirens was the first novel that I really connected with. I've read it so many times. "It flung them like stones." Ha, come to think of it, I was in a band called The Ghosts of Saturn, my brother was in one called CSI (ChronoSynclastic Infundibulum).. Isn't there supposed to be a movie coming out soon? Once years ago I was in a 2nd hand bookshop in Sydney, and could hear a few staff members chatting excitedly in a back room. They were laughing over plot-points in Sirens! I listened for a long while, without revealing my presence. It was glorious. :-) It just occurred to me to recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it the movie Gentlemen Broncos. I hadn't associated that and Sirens before, but there are many similarities. It's totally sci-fi, totally hilarious, and has a kind of Vonnegutian sugar-coated melancholy too. 5 stars!
TipVFL 8y ago
If you're interested in story structure, Dan Harmon (creator of Community, co-creator of Rick and Morty) wrote some great tutorials that you can read here: http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_... It's basically a distillation of Joseph Campbell, and it's really entertaining and informative.
goto11 8y ago
I think some people are taking exactly the opposite from this talk than what Vonnegut intended. It is not like Vonnegut have discovered stories have different dramatic curves. This was common knowledge at the time of Aristotle. The genres Tragedy and Comedy was defined by the Greeks according to the curve of fortune: A tragedy was about bad things happening to good people (to put is succinctly) while comedy was the opposite. So the curves of fortune have been fundamental for the understanding of drama since antiquity. What Vonnegut is pointing out is that in Hamlet the change in fortune is actually not so clear-cut. It is often ambiguous if what happens is actually "good" or "bad". So you cant really plot it on such a curve. Hence his assertion that Shakespeare was a bad storyteller - at least according to simplified narrative models. What he actually states is that real life is too ambiguous to plot on a god/bad curve, and that Hamlet is a masterpiece because it reflects this ambiguity. He is not condoning Heroes Journey or other cookie-cutter narrative models.
- foobarbecue 8y ago
  Yes, and vonnegut's stories really are like Shakespeare in this way. Events in them tend to make you go "woah" or "hunh" rather than "phew" or "waah".
- weinzierl 8y ago
  This is an excellent summary. > I think some people are taking exactly the opposite from this talk than what Vonnegut intended. It's understandable though: Vonnegut spends more than half of the talk explaining the curves. When he comes to the really interesting point about Hamlet the connection to the first part is only loose. He only references Cinderalla and The Metamorphosis. And this is were my real gripe is: Of all the typical comedies and tragedies of the world he could have chosen any two to make his point. But he chose The Metamorphosis which is one of the worst examples to support his point. Sure, Gregor Samsa starts out in a bad position, but does he end worse? He doesn't seem to be concerned much about his death. Besides that everyone else in the novella ends up much better than in the beginning and the last chapter is certainly the brightest (warm sun and all).
RangerScience 8y ago
I remember reading about how older stories - Odyssey, creation myths, god myths - are a different "sort" of story than we have now, and miss notable elements such as twists. Mysteries weren't a thing. And, that this was because these stories were primary told through oral tradition, so you would hear the same stories over and over again. So stories that weren't enjoyable when you knew what would happen either didn't get told, or didn't last. Now, we experience most stories only once, so things like twists work. Thought that was an interesting idea, and Vonnegut's take on primitive stories reminded me of it.

146 points by homarp 8y ago

An infographic version http://www.mayaeilam.com/2012/01/01/the-shapes-of-stories-a-kurt-vonnegut-infographic/ http://www.mayaeilam.com/2012/01/01/the-shapes-of-stories-a-...

iaw 8y ago

There's an excellent video where he goes through these [0], worth a watch if you have the time. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc

davidw 8y ago

> I have just demonstrated to you that Shakespeare was as poor a storyteller as any Arapaho. What do the Arapaho have to do with any of this?

elefanten 8y ago
It's a callback to the section about "primitive peoples" and their supposedly flat stories.

hirundo 8y ago

I wonder if there's a decent correlation between the Vonnegut diagram of a movie's protagonist and the movie's box office. I'd guess that flat and monotonic downward curves are at a disadvantage, an upsloped ending an advantage. But you might be able to find interesting things about the number and intervals of minima and maxima, etc. It'd be interesting to look at the magnitude of the peaks and troughs too, but how would you calibrate the x axis across movies or between scenes? If it works you could be as successful in Hollywood as Raffles, the barefoot executive.

jfoutz 8y ago
There are a few. The AA advertisement up in the air, the counterfeiter catch me if you can, and Sophia copala’s lost in translation all spring to mind. Not smashing successes, but sort of light stories about nothing when nothing happens. Getting the same effect with gravity is harder. Precious might fall in that category.
goto11 8y ago
Oh yeah, basically all successful manistream movies follows the same dramatic model with standardized plot points designated "inciting incident", "midpoint", "point of no return" and so on. You are not going to revolutionize Hollywood with this insight. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure I think Vonnegut is actually satirizing this and saying truth is more important than dramatic structure. Popular fiction tend to have very clear dramatic curves, but Vonnegut is saying real life is more ambiguous.
- sacado2 8y ago
  I am really amazed at how much we talk about that 3 act structure. Basically, it says, well, you have a beginning, and then a middle, and then the story ends. Not very helpful for writers, and it is not even descriptive. If only it told you "well, your first third is the beginning, next third middle, last third ending", but no. Actually, the second act is usually twice longer than each other, as shown in the wikipedia article, and it is usually cut in two parts, as there is a huge event in the middle ("No, I am your father"-kind-of-event). OK, so, basically, you have 4 acts, right? Why not call it a 4-act structure? And you still don't know how to structure them. OTOH, I like Lester Dent's famous master plot formula, written in the 30s for pulp fiction short stories: https://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html https://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html . It is written for action-packed short stories, obviously, but describes pretty well the structure of most Hollywood successes, too. And it can help writers, well, write interesting stories (although it must be adapted, obviously, unless you are writing a "must defeat the villain" story).
  - goto11 8y ago
    "Tree act structure" does not just mean that a story is split into three parts. At least as used by screenwriters, it is a term for a tried-and-true narrative structure with a lot of well-defined elements, for example that the protagonist should get a goal in the beginning which transform into a deeper personal goal, that stakes should increase and the protagonist have their deepest core challenged and so on.
  - thanatropism 8y ago
egypturnash 8y ago
Realistically this kind of work has already been done. It’s usually not described in these terms but there is a lot of analysis of What Works in the field of screenwriting manuals. “Save The Cat” is one that’s really narrowed in on What Sells. It’s not about what makes a “great” movie, it’s about what makes a movie that makes a good profit, and it’s kind of hilarious how much that book conflates profit-making films with great films. I recommend reading it with a very cynical eye as to what biases it’s author has before you go taking it as gospel.

2bitencryption 8y ago

I have no clue what Vonnegut's speaking voice/manner is like, but I read this with Feynman's voice, and it worked very perfectly.

mjrbrennan 8y ago
Here is a video version of it so you can hear! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ

blackzeppelin 8y ago

I learned this in a creative writing workshop and now I can't never think of a story without these guidelines. Every story each time fits into one of those descriptions, even the things that I write somehow end up being a shape of a story as described by Vonnegut. I find it very helpful but at the same time exasperating.

palad1n 8y ago

I had the great fortune of seeing him do this live, back in the last millennium. The best one had to be Kafka's "Metamorphosis".

ArrayList 8y ago
I think that warrants a more detailed account of the story... do tell?

ryanchoi 8y ago

In 2016 people analyzed a bunch of fiction and these trajectories showed up: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07772 https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07772 Articles about: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601848/data-mining-reveals-the-six-basic-emotional-arcs-of-storytelling/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601848/data-mining-reveal... https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/the-six-main-arcs-in-storytelling-identified-by-a-computer/490733/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/the-s...

pfd1986 8y ago
Is that the same idea behind Campbell's "The Power of the Myth"? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Myth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Myth
beautifulfreak 8y ago
The arxiv paper holds a link to the hedonometer, where all books in Project Gutenberg have been mapped. http://hedonometer.org/books/v3/1524/ http://hedonometer.org/books/v3/1524/
- jonnydubowsky 8y ago
  I love the "per word happiness shift". I could totally see an ill-conceived startup offering a quantified self analysis tool... "with our handy all-day surveillance via your phone, we will analyze every word said by or to you and help you understand your per-word happiness shift!".

nsomaru 8y ago

As an aside, I always thought that Polonius’ advice to Leartes is excellent, and certainly did not read it the way Vonnegut implies.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

andy_ppp 8y ago

I highly recommend The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut - little read compares to his other books but fantastic Sci Fi IMO.

staticautomatic 8y ago
I've read most of his books and think The Sirens of Titan is arguably the best.
yesenadam 8y ago
I love that (well, and Breakfast of Champions) so much I could never get into his other novels much, because they're not them. Sirens was the first novel that I really connected with. I've read it so many times. "It flung them like stones." Ha, come to think of it, I was in a band called The Ghosts of Saturn, my brother was in one called CSI (ChronoSynclastic Infundibulum).. Isn't there supposed to be a movie coming out soon? Once years ago I was in a 2nd hand bookshop in Sydney, and could hear a few staff members chatting excitedly in a back room. They were laughing over plot-points in Sirens! I listened for a long while, without revealing my presence. It was glorious. :-) It just occurred to me to recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it the movie Gentlemen Broncos. I hadn't associated that and Sirens before, but there are many similarities. It's totally sci-fi, totally hilarious, and has a kind of Vonnegutian sugar-coated melancholy too. 5 stars!

TipVFL 8y ago

If you're interested in story structure, Dan Harmon (creator of Community, co-creator of Rick and Morty) wrote some great tutorials that you can read here: http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_... It's basically a distillation of Joseph Campbell, and it's really entertaining and informative.

goto11 8y ago

I think some people are taking exactly the opposite from this talk than what Vonnegut intended. It is not like Vonnegut have discovered stories have different dramatic curves. This was common knowledge at the time of Aristotle. The genres Tragedy and Comedy was defined by the Greeks according to the curve of fortune: A tragedy was about bad things happening to good people (to put is succinctly) while comedy was the opposite. So the curves of fortune have been fundamental for the understanding of drama since antiquity. What Vonnegut is pointing out is that in Hamlet the change in fortune is actually not so clear-cut. It is often ambiguous if what happens is actually "good" or "bad". So you cant really plot it on such a curve. Hence his assertion that Shakespeare was a bad storyteller - at least according to simplified narrative models. What he actually states is that real life is too ambiguous to plot on a god/bad curve, and that Hamlet is a masterpiece because it reflects this ambiguity. He is not condoning Heroes Journey or other cookie-cutter narrative models.

foobarbecue 8y ago
Yes, and vonnegut's stories really are like Shakespeare in this way. Events in them tend to make you go "woah" or "hunh" rather than "phew" or "waah".
weinzierl 8y ago
This is an excellent summary. > I think some people are taking exactly the opposite from this talk than what Vonnegut intended. It's understandable though: Vonnegut spends more than half of the talk explaining the curves. When he comes to the really interesting point about Hamlet the connection to the first part is only loose. He only references Cinderalla and The Metamorphosis. And this is were my real gripe is: Of all the typical comedies and tragedies of the world he could have chosen any two to make his point. But he chose The Metamorphosis which is one of the worst examples to support his point. Sure, Gregor Samsa starts out in a bad position, but does he end worse? He doesn't seem to be concerned much about his death. Besides that everyone else in the novella ends up much better than in the beginning and the last chapter is certainly the brightest (warm sun and all).

RangerScience 8y ago

I remember reading about how older stories - Odyssey, creation myths, god myths - are a different "sort" of story than we have now, and miss notable elements such as twists. Mysteries weren't a thing. And, that this was because these stories were primary told through oral tradition, so you would hear the same stories over and over again. So stories that weren't enjoyable when you knew what would happen either didn't get told, or didn't last. Now, we experience most stories only once, so things like twists work. Thought that was an interesting idea, and Vonnegut's take on primitive stories reminded me of it.