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Kurt Vonnegut on 8 ‘shapes’ of stories
- mannykannot 6y agoI am not sure that the archetypical detective or mystery story would fit easily into this framework, as there are two concurrent stories: the misleading one that the author is stringing you along with, and the 'real' story as revealed in the denouement. The signature element of this style is that the 'facts' presented as part of the former are still there, but viewed differently, in the latter.
- m1gu3l 6y agoagreed, seems like there are story shapes yet to be discovered. i wonder what the graph of the hard-boiled detective story would look like given your description... the shape-shifter story shape?
- Kinrany 6y agoThe primary difference seems to be that a detective story does not have a protagonist: the reader does not know everything the main character knows.
- bonoboTP 6y agoTalking about detective stories and unusual narrative structures, I've really liked the American series 'Columbo' with Peter Falk while growing up. It's very popular in my country (Hungary, there's even a statue of him in Budapest), not sure about elsewhere. It turns the typical detective story to its head. You see the murder and who does it as the first thing in the episode. The rest is how the detective intuits it and then most importantly the psychological battle and clever tricks required to corner the murderer and prove it was him.
- keiferski 6y agoColumbo was pretty well-known in the nineties, so much so that it was referenced in contemporary hip hop songs as a byword for ‘cop’ or ‘detective.’ https://youtu.be/aaPQsYqNDnY https://youtu.be/aaPQsYqNDnY (NSFW, language)
- js8 6y agoMaybe Columbo has "From bad to worse" shape. The main protagonist isn't the detective, but the murderer. He starts badly - with a murder - and then it's downhill from there.
- smogcutter 6y ago“Oh, just one more thing...”
- Hokusai 6y agoKurt Vonnegut is one of that rare academics to be able to entertain and teach at the same time. (Not that this attribute is any more common outside academia) The shape of stories is a very good pedagogical tool to understand narrative, a nice complement to the Hero's Journey. It makes it more intuitive and easier to apply to other story structures, and even to see different approaches from different cultures. If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.
- sitkack 6y agoI'd love to see a conversation between Vonnegut and Hofstadter with John Cleese as the MC. There is this atomic purity when you come across someone who ruthlessly wants to drive at the truth. Not be right. Not have power. Not project their aesthetic. Nothing but the truth. That is the kind of person I aspire to be.
- js8 6y agoI am confused, there is only 7 shapes in the infographic. What is the 8th?
- rchase 6y agoMaybe the 8th is an implied nested recursion. It's the story of Mr. Vonnegut telling the story of the other 7 shapes.
- js8 6y agoBut his story has "New Testament" shape - he worked on his thesis, and then it was rejected by his fellow academics. Now, a successful author, he became vindicated by these popular articles.
- Aardwolf 6y agoThere are so many more possible shapes, I'm a bit dissatisfied with the lack of variation in the infographic E.g. the Simpsons episode with the Monkey's Paw is a roller coaster of ups and downs
- dcolkitt 6y agoTime travel. The only plot structure that's truly unique to modernity.[1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_travel_works_of_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_travel_works_of_f...
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- whitten 6y agoI was surprised when I reviewed this page, I thought 'Rags to Riches' was one of his story shapes, but I don't see it there. I thought it was a vertical flip of 'From Bad to Worse'. Starting very low, and becoming wonderful eventually. Stories with Genies granting Wishes would fit this shape. What shape would you use to graph the Monkey's Paw stories ? (where you think you are getting a great wish, but end up with a bad cause for the good thngs)
- Myto 6y agoRags to riches is Cinderella, which indeed is featured.
- darkerside 6y agoAnd also, different characters have different desires and motivations. The story had its own arc, but it's oversimplifying to act like there aren't many mini arcs performed by the characters of every story.
- briankelly 6y agoMonkey's Paw fits well with "From Bad to Worse" in my opinion. There's a couple of Twilight Zones that follow a similar pattern. Usually in these stories there is a brief blip of good but in soon the characters find themselves into a deeper hole as a trend.
- seanalltogether 6y agoSo when plotted over time, the main character will trend toward good fortune or bad fortune. Is this almost too basic to be able to draw comparisons between similar shaped stories?
- runawaybottle 6y agoEh, the Greeks just made tragedies like they were Disney making comic book movies. Never underestimate how formulaic storytellers have always been.
- Konohamaru 6y agoThe anime Naruto might be a millennial/gen-z example of the Creation Story archetype. Naruto starts out as the primordial void, formless chaos, but then is given gifts (Rasengan, Sage mode, etc...) in sequence.
- KineticLensman 6y agoI really like Vonnegut and the 8 stories idea is nice, but I’m not convinced that he has covered all of the bases here, at least not according to the summary infographic. Two of the shapes (‘Man in Hole’ and ‘Boy meets Girl’) are actually the same. ‘New Testament’ and ‘Cinderalla’ also have the same shape (good-things-bad-things-good-things) but are step functions rather than smooth curves. The exception shape (‘which way is up’) I parse as ‘It’s complicated’ and is a repeated set of ups and downs. Perhaps, at this level of shape, it’s a bit like saying that all software is just a variation on CRUD.
- Bodell 6y agoYou should actually watch his lecture on this. It resembles a a comedy routine far more than something that would be ‘covering all the bases’. The stories that are similar, are in fact presented that way and the punch line to jokes. You are definitely right about the “it’s complicated” part and this ends up being the main thesis of the whole speech he is giving. Which is: that real life is complicated so which way is up?
- mpalmer 6y agoThe diagram is secondhand, but Man in Hole and Boy Meets Girl are not at all the same. BMG has a neutral status quo with a big lift at the beginning when they meet. MIH starts out living large, then loses it all. BMG: Sleepless in Seattle MIH: A Christmas Carol BMG + MIH: Groundhog Day
- crispycrafter2 6y agoIpad
- hexomancer 6y agoThe video lecture of Vonnegut himself explaining this is also worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc
- jackyinger 6y agoHere’s the whole lecture (he had a fair bit to say before he got to the shape of stories) if you have ample time and enjoy Vonnegut’s speaking style: https://youtu.be/4_RUgnC1lm8 https://youtu.be/4_RUgnC1lm8
- lazyant 6y agoSeems to me almost every Hollywood movie is a "man in the hole" / "boy meets girl", as in somebody leads a normal life, something happens (could be something not bad, like a new challenge) and the main character(s) come out victorious. Maybe I'm simplifying and applying a template to the "happy ending" cliche.
- red_admiral 6y agoI think there's a parallel here to the "Shaman's Journey", which might be the oldest story pattern out there (see e.g. [1]). The original pattern had the Shaman travel into the world of the supernatural to complete a kind of quest to solve a problem back home. In the Western world, the "supernatural realm" stopped catching on after a while, so we got first the Hero's Journey (vice Campbell) and the modern version of that myth, the MIH/BMG story where the protagonist gets into trouble and out again, possibly while staying in the same town all along. [1] https://sites.google.com/a/bc.edu/healing-our-world-shaman-today/home/the-hero-s-quest-and-the-shaman-s-journey https://sites.google.com/a/bc.edu/healing-our-world-shaman-t...
- lazyant 6y agoYes, The Hero's Journey seems a subset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey
- smogcutter 6y agoEven in modern uses of the hero’s journey model the world of the story is usually thematically supernatural, even if it isn’t literally magical. The protagonist is leading a normal life, until they answer the call and next thing you know they’re surrounded by explosions, secret agents, treasure, gangsters, etc. The hero leaves the mundane world for the magical world of the story, which plays by a different set of rules.
- dmitrygr 6y agoAllow me to ruin all Hollywood movies for you: "Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need". https://www.amazon.com/Save-Last-Book-Screenwriting-Youll/dp/1932907009 https://www.amazon.com/Save-Last-Book-Screenwriting-Youll/dp... Once you read this, you'll start seeing that every popular movie today follows this guide, almost precisely to-the-minute. Book says "by page X of screenplay, Y should happen" and you'll see that it does.
- KittenInABox 6y agoHow does this apply to the 4-part/3-part japanese structure?
- benjismith 6y agoYES! These are pretty much exactly the methods I used when I developed my project http://prosecraft.io http://prosecraft.io You can see the emotional story arc -- the shapes of the stories -- for more than 16,000 books. I train a Word2Vec model on the vocabulary of all those books (almost 1.5 billion words) and then I use a clustering algorithm to score all those words on a sentiment scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 is the most negative and 10 is the most positive). Then I break the books into 50 equal-sized chunks and aggregate the positive and negative scores for each chunk. You can click on any of the chart segments to see a word cloud of all the words that contributed to the positive and negative sentiment of that chunk. You can really see the ups and downs of the stories, as the protagonists struggle to overcome their obstacles, when you look at those charts! Here are a few of my favorite example books to show people: The Hobbit http://prosecraft.io/library/j-r-r-tolkien/the-hobbit/ http://prosecraft.io/library/j-r-r-tolkien/the-hobbit/ Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows http://prosecraft.io/library/j-k-rowling/harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hallows/ http://prosecraft.io/library/j-k-rowling/harry-potter-and-th... Animal Farm http://prosecraft.io/library/george-orwell/animal-farm/ http://prosecraft.io/library/george-orwell/animal-farm/ I first encountered this method not through Vonnegut but through the "Hedonometer" project, at the University of Vermont Computational Story Lab. They use this technique on the twitter firehose, to measure the overall emotional arc of the world, as expressed in social media. https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/ https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/ There's an excellent episode of the podcast Lexicon Valley where they discuss the hedonometer project, with the researchers at UVM who developed it... http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2015/06/lexicon_valley_the_pollyanna_hypothesis_all_languages_have_a_positivity.html http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2015/0...
- danlangdev 6y agoWow! I've been a longtime lurker on HN, and I created an account to just tell you that prosecraft.io is beautifully designed! Would you mind sharing what visualization tools or libraries you used to render your graphs?
- benjismith 6y agoAwww thank you! I really appreciate it! I'm not using any visualization libraries. It's all just hand-coded javascript... I've been meaning to learn D3 for a long time, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.