At the Blackboard: Kurt Vonnegut diagrams the shapes of stories (2005)
laphamsquarterly.org
laphamsquarterly.org
https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07772
Articles about:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601848/data-mining-reveal...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/the-s...
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.
> 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).
It's basically a distillation of Joseph Campbell, and it's really entertaining and informative.
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.
If it works you could be as successful in Hollywood as Raffles, the barefoot executive.
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.
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.
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 . 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).
I have a strange itch to write a small stage play (one act, two actors) -- even though I will probably live to see it performed. Is there anything like the master plot formula or even Campbell/Vogler/Save the cat style templates for the stage?
Because there's a fairly concrete distinction between acts in stage plays, and that's how plays using the structure are tradition broken up (act divisions in film and novels are often more metaphor than concrete, so, yeah, without the stage precedent, it would make more sense to name it for the four parts, two of which are jammed together in the three-act model.)
> And you still don't know how to structure them.
Yes, you do; the general “shape” of the structure had been described in detail for a long time; the three-act structure isn't just “a beginning, middle, and end”, it's a very particular shape (the Wikipedia page is a good brief description, but their are good sized books covering it in detail.)
> It is written for action-packed short stories, obviously, but describes pretty well the structure of most Hollywood successes, too.
Not really; it's got a lot of genre and form specific but, though it's certainly not entirely useless outside of that focus. The Writer's Journey is better for describing the shape of Hollywood successes (Save the Cat does so even more precisely for recent ones, providing very close to a minute-by-minute breakdown.)
I don't know, lots of classical works were written with more than 3 acts, for instance lots of works from Molière, Corneille or Shakespeare consist in 5 acts. The legend says back then acts were as long as the candles lighting the scene lasted, but I don't know if it's true. If it is, it's the old equivalent of five act structure in tv series, mandated by commercials' breaks: the number of acts is determined by external reasons, not narrative ones.
> Not really; it's got a lot of genre and form specific but, though it's certainly not entirely useless outside of that focus. The Writer's Journey is better for describing the shape of Hollywood successes (Save the Cat does so even more precisely for recent ones, providing very close to a minute-by-minute breakdown.)
Yeah, I forgot about those 2 (I wrote my comment in a hurry). They are way better examples, for sure.
“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.
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!
What do the Arapaho have to do with any of this?