Interesting video. Thanks for sharing. Seems the shape of stories depends on what happens to the characters.
For these stories, at least. You could draw a shape around events--inciting event, rising action, climax, falling action etc.
Is he the first one to take standard story metrics and turn them into a visual graph? You see that stuff all the time now, I wonder if it was his idea?
According to the article at the link, the shape of stories: was the basic idea behind the master’s thesis that Kurt Vonnegut submitted to the anthropology department at the University of Chicago. It was rejected, however, “because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut said. Kurt Vonnegut on the 8 “shapes” of stories
Yeah, I remember reading that. There was another thread about this just recently. So it sounds like it might have been his brainchild. He was definitely one smart cookie.
Vonnegut is the shit. My aunt knew him a little bit through academia. Said he was the most obnoxious asshole she'd ever met. Somehow that didn't disappoint me.
Well, he was an unhappy man for a long time, struggling with depression his entire life, raising not only his own children, but his sibling's, and acutely pessimistic in his view of the world. His survival of the bombing of Dresden, and his witnessing the awful carnage that was around him when he emerged from the slaughterhouse that protected him, left him with scars that never really healed. And there are tons of people who found him one of the sweetest and kindest people they'd ever met. So maybe it was your aunt who was the problem. Or maybe one of them or the other was just having a bad day. We've all been there, haven't we?
