In 4 minutes, Kurt Vonnegut explains stories better than anyone I’ve ever heard. “The shape of the curve is what matters. Not their origins.” He plots stories on 2 axes: X: Time Y: Good fortune / ill fortune He goes on to say, “Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.” Point 1: Stories have defined patterns. In Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces, he makes the case for the Hero’s Journey. Since then, it’s become the most famous storytelling structure in the world. Vonnegut argued stories could be divided into 8 shapes. Each story, he said, fit one of the 8. Point 2: Vonnegut says, “Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — so the reader may see what they're made of.” To see who your characters really are, you have to make them suffer. Only then does your audience have someone worth cheering for. Point 3: End on a high note. Vonnegut says, “It’s not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers.” The way a story makes people feel when they finish is how they remember it. It’s called recency bias. Lift people up and they will love you. *** “There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth.” I wrote this with @RobbieCrab. Follow him for lessons on storytelling + fundraising. And I talk about creative storytelling & writing fiction. Follow me @nathanbaugh27 for more like that.
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That’s the only video I can find from that particular lecture. Here’s a different, longer talk he gave on the same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Vonnegut wrote his Masters thesis on ‘The shape of stories.’ It was rejected because: “It was so simple and looked like too much fun.” His own words. Some people don’t recognize genius when it’s right in front of them. His 8 shapes:
Vonnegut begins his exceptional 2004 lecture with, “Well, there’s no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers.” Fast-forward to 2016 and researchers at The University of Adelaide decided to do just that. I wrote more here: https://www.worldbuilders.ai/p...