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Today on Fable and the Verbivore, we’re sharing our episode digging into the idea that there is a shape to stories.

In this episode, Fable opens by talking about Kurt Vonnegut’s lecture on his rejected anthropology dissertation that most stories have simple shapes that can be plotted on a graph of good to ill fortune over time (story start to story end) And it turns out, based on a study performed by the U. of Vermont and U. of Adelaide in 2016, he was more or less right.

Here are the main categories of story that he identifies in his lecture:

• Man in a hole (or Double man in a hole) - Person gets into trouble and then gets out of it

• Boy Meets Girl  - Person gets something, loses something, and gets it back again

• Cinderella - Person starts low and stair climbs up, then has a lower point, before a happy ending

• From Bad to Worse - Person downward spirals from a bad situation to a worse one

• Which Way is Up - Person experiences many things, but we’re unable to tell what is good and ill fortune. Most like life.

The research study created an objective way to assess stories from Project Gutenberg’s database of stories that mostly agreed with Vonnegut, but here are their categories:

• Rags to Riches (rise)

• Riches to Rags (fall)

• Man in a Hole (fall then rise)

• Icarus (rise then fall)

• Cinderella (rise then fall then rise)

• Oedipus (fall then rise then fall)

Another way to look at these story shapes is by talking about how the emotional elevation is in the story, because sometimes the objective fortune that befalls a character may not exactly track with how they feel about it.

We also talk about how story is defined by change, but the play “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett is an experimental one where time and dialogue pass, without bringing any change to the characters or their circumstances. We talk about it being an exception that proves the rule as the play’s catharsis comes when the play ends and the audience leaves and step back into reality.

Towards the end of our conversation, we talk about how looking at story this way can help you plan and write towards the point where your story falls, so that you get the emotion of a drop in fortune or emotional low point to read as authentic vs. a fabricated obstacle that doesn’t feel like it rings true. This also helps with identifying where you can really allow your characters to lean in and feel the height of joy.

We hope you enjoy this episode! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

Fable opens by talking about Kurt Vonnegut’s Shape of Stories lecture. Youtube has two versions and they are:

• YouTube Video “Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories”    

• YouTube Video “Kurt Vonnegut, Shape of Stories Feb. 2004”  

We referenced several articles for this conversation. Here they are:

• BigThink.com article Kurt Vonnegut on the 8 “shapes” of stories

• Medium.com article What Kurt Vonnegut’s Shape of Stories Lecture Can Teach Us About Writing Music

• TheStory.au article Kurt Vonnegut graphed the world’s most popular stories. Do his diagrams tell us something important about humanity?

• The U. of Vermont Paper, EPJ Data Science The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes

Books Mentioned:

• Keanu - Directed by Peter Atencio

• Breaking Bad TV Series

• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

• Hamlet by William Shakespeare

• Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts by Samuel Beckett

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Music from:https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)