Kurt Vonnegut on the “shapes” of stories

This is even explained in the article. It is the "infographic" which entirely misrepresent his point.

The title of the article is also rather misleading. It makes is sound like he thinks there is exactly 8 possible shapes, while he is just showing some examples.

Beautiful talk. Vonnegut nailed it.

Hamlet was the truth of his time. There is meaning to life and stories about life that you can't describe as lying.

"We don't know enough in life to know what the good news is and the bad news is."

We won't know the answer to this challenge for a very long time.

Contextomy, happens all the time https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016344370505397...

Stop trying to educate me. I just want to be entertained. Tell me that I am smart.

What an inspiring lecture… thanks for posting!

I'm not sure he did, at least not in terms of serious, academic, literery theory but you can perhaps see how it might be a useful heuristic for an author in terms of thinking about what type of story they want ot write. Vonnegut was always throwing half baked ideas into the public realm just to see where they'd land and that's a large part of his appeal for me (c.f. the stories of Kilgore Trout).

This shapes of stories thing that resurfaces every so often is kind of perfect for internet amplification, it's easy to grasp there's the potential for some nice pictures and Vonnegut is always engaging as a both speaker and a writer. I'd read his essay on the topic in the 90s because I'm a Vonnegut completist but at the time I don't think it was considered anything other than a minor flight of fancy. It's kind of a shame that things like this and DFWs "this is watter" speech which are kind of easily graspable tend ot eclipse the more interesting stuff. Though maybe it's a gateway.

It is definitely not supposed to be taken at face value. He explicitly mentions that Hamlet cannot be graphed like this - it is too ambiguous whether the events are "good fortune" or "ill fortune". He concludes that "Shakespeare was a poor storyteller".

His actual point is that we don't know enough to tell whether events are actually good or ill fortune, and therefore stories like Cinderella (or the Bible) does not reflect the ambiguities of real life.

> he should have known better.

This is a sign that you may not have outsmarted him, he may have outsmarted you. Of course, that's a communication failure on his part, but when you're speaking to a large audience the failure to communicate your idea is measured as a percentage of the audience, not a boolean.

Have you read his thesis?

Vonnegut is not saying there are only 8 possible shapes, he is just graphing some examples.

I thought the same. Sloppy editing. If you watch the included video, the graph that Vonnegut draws for Cinderella starts below the B/E axis, not above like the New Testament.

I suspect the author wanted you to notice the similarity between 7 and 8 when you got to them, not at the beginning of the article.

Hamlet would graph as a straight line along the Beginning-Entropy axis.

This is so cool and is absolutely the direction this is going.

I've heard it broken down into those two before. It's an interesting take, but one that I don't think aptly describes the "two stories". My own take on "there are two types of stories" is:

1. Something must change

2. Change needs to be prevented

Just about every story boils down to one of those concepts, and how the characters respond to the needed/pending change.

Great choices. Welcome to the Monkey House is pretty great, too.

Slapstick is a favorite.

Same for me except I started to notice characters that get no or very little backstory. Then I just sit and wait for them to die. Stupid brain.

Suffering through and overcoming challenges on the way to victory/triumph/transformation is as old as the earliest myths, and is often called "The Hero's Journey": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey

If you want to learn more, you might enjoy Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces

Blockbuster movies were ruined for me when I read "Save the cat". I then went on to ruin them for others by recommending the book :-)

In all honesty though, the most enjoyment I get from large-budget movies now is the visual effects. The plot is basically the same shape: all 21 of the Marvel movies have the same basic shape, and that is because that shape sells really well.

I think it (and the 8 shapes concept) can rather deepen awareness of the complexity of storytelling by giving us a roadmap to recognize and appreciate the nuances of a skilled execution (how did the teller hide the features of the trope? How did they misdirect us? How did they approach the features in a new way?).

Emotional responses to art are predicated on expectations either met or contradicted; more understanding of the structures of a medium leads to more active expectation (especially thanks to the generation of a common language with the artist) which can provide more gratifying depth of emotional response.

That is his point...

Or only one bit: rise/fall. Most stories have 2 or 3 bits, some have so many that you can't get a meaningful average.

I was going to post that folklore framework. I love initiatives to formally catalogue and index everyday, organic, non-quantitative things like stories. Does anyone know of similar efforts in any other fields?

Or 31 basic structural elements? Identified in Russian folk tales by folklorist Vladimir Propp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp#Narrative_struc...

There's also the late Blake Snyder's Save The Cat tenfold classification scheme for screenplays, which can be useful at least for ameliorating a bad movie watching experience by leading to debates over which one of the ten categories you just saw.

On the other hand, if you know his categories, it can take away from the enjoyment of films; once you know you're watching a movie of a specific category, it's easy to anticipate the rest of the plot.

Cinderella ends happily ever after and the New Testament doesn’t. I think it’s that simple.

I think the point is they have the same “shape”, at least when you graph them like this.

Cinderella's story arc doesn't look the same to me. She is told from the start that she has until 12 to enjoy herself. When the spell wears off, she doesn't complain or even feel very sad; she just relishes the experience she's gone through. She's also never in any real danger, except for being locked in her room. Her stepmother also causes the glass slipper to break, but she still had the other to prove she was at the ball.

Or to take the shapes and generate stories that fit.

Visual character arcs, plotlines, mood, pacing, tension, etc.

A friend did this for a school project! It was super cool - Harry potter was cool because the later books took on different shapes, which to me showed one of the reasons such a simple set of stories got so popular (Book 1 is Cinderella; Book 5 is Kafka; Book 7 is "Man in a Hole", etc.).

But ultimately, on real data, what it boiled down to is "there are only so many general shapes you can plot in 2D." It apparently became a very manual visualization process: the normalization problems (book length, length of good/bad bits, etc.) from different texts swamped any new shapes one could conceivably identify using the method.

Avoid almost all western stories then, especially the ancient Greek dramas

Life just is.

Profound!

As Vonnegut wrote extensively in Slaughterhouse Five: “So it goes.”

I love stories and movies that are kind of just like "man a bunch of shit just happened, is there really a lesson? who knows" (like Burn After Reading for a comedic example).

There doesn't have to be a "point" for there to be beauty or something to learn from people and their lives and experiences, fictional or not.

a detective story would naturally take the shape of Which Way is Up

In many detective stories, the detective is not the main character. They are the point-of-view, but act more like a force of nature passing through the story unchanged while someone else is going through a complex character arc while witnessing the unfolding of the story.

I would argue every story has a vast, seemingly infinite* number of shapes, limited only by our ability to model objectives toward which events can be classified as positive or negative. Still, that doesn't make it a useless method of analysis because we can find objectives that can be applied across stories in a somewhat universal way. Or, authors can simply come up with objectives that they think might be interesting.

*I suppose these numbers would be combinatorically constrained by a function of the number of graphemes/phonemes, and not actually infinite, but still huge.

> there is this underlying hypothesis that things that happen to the main chracter can be qualified as true or bad.

Vonneguts point is actually the opposite:

> In Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and what the bad news is, and we respond to that.