How to Shape Your Stories, According to Kurt vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut once gave a talk about the way in which he analyzed stories. It’s one of the most simple and enlightening methods I’ve ever seen. In this article I’ll explore how to apply it to the stories you tell. Here’s the lecture. If you don’t want to watch the video, then keep reading. I will proceed as if you hadn’t.
A rejected thesis
Vonnegut called this theory his “prettiest contribution to culture.” But it was rejected when he presented it as his thesis for an MD in anthropology “because it was so simple and looked like too much fun.” He added later that he had “tried to bring scientific thinking to literary criticism” and that there had been “very little gratitude” for that.
In practice, it involves simply plotting the progression of the story on a line graph. The X axis represents time (or, in his words, the story going from B for beginning to E for entropy). The Y axis represents “good fortune”(at the top) and “ill fortune” (at the bottom). Don’t worry too much about the particular meaning of these last two terms. For now, just take them at face value. I’ll clarify later, I promise.
The man-in-the-hole shape
Start up, then down, then up again. This shape is the simplest. Vonnegut compares it to a, well, man that gets in a hole and later gets out. He starts out in a reasonably good position, dips deep down, then back up a little higher than he started. Of course, he specifies, it doesn’t need to be a man and it doesn’t need to be a hole.
You may compare this to Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, except represented on a line graph instead of a circle. The hero sets out, enters the other world (or dips downwards in the graph), reaches their lowest point (also the lowest on the graph), then climbs back up and ends up at a place higher than where they started, having grown stronger or wiser on their journey.
I suggest using it for stories which have a particular lesson to teach or message to give. Especially in our plague year, it’s easy for a reader to latch onto the initial premise of “everything went to hell, but here’s how I made it back.” That’s the reason why just about every article that goes “how I made X000$ working from home in Y days/weeks/months” has this shape.
The boy-meets-girl shape
Start at the middle, go up, then down, then up again. A boy, in neither too good or nor too bad starting situation, meets a girl. He goes up. But something bad happens, be it a breakup or any other kind of strain in their relationship. Then the problem is solved and he bounces back. Again, doesn’t need to be a boy and doesn’t need to be a girl. Or a relationship, even.
This is a slightly altered man-in-the-hole. It starts at the middle and rises, instead of directly at the top. It’s common in TV series, novels, generally everything that presents large amounts of content. They often present a normal situation later upended by bad or good events in succession.
You can explain complex topics this way. If you were to talk about the history of a particular political movement or the development of a new piece of technology, starting from a neutral point is the most natural thing to do.
The Cinderella shape
Start down, then up, then down, then up again. Cinderella starts in a bad position: her mother has died, her stepmother mistreats her. But then the fairy godmother enchants her, she goes to the ball and the prince falls in love with her — that’s going up. The clock strikes, everything falls apart, she runs away — that’s going down. But then the slipper fits, and the prince recognizes her, and they all lived happily ever after — the line tends towards infinity, on the good side.
This is much like the three act structure present in many movies and taught in film school. Every turn of the line represents a climax: going up when the fairy godmother appears is one, then the midpoint when the clock strikes 12, another climax when the prince recognizes her, then finally descending action. Because what’s a climax if not things going from bad to good, or the opposite? Bad to good, then good to bad, then bad to good again.
Use this when you want to connect with people who are or have been in a particular bad spot. If the man-in-a-hole appeals to those who were up and then went down, this appeals to those who don’t even know what up is or have a hard time finding it. A lot of psychological, personal stories — such as those published in this very website on Human Parts or Be Yourself — have this shape. The protagonist starts in a bad spot and, through trials and tribulations, gets themselves into a better place. Or, for the more entrepreneurially inclined, think of all the startup success stories of people who built a company from their bedroom.
The Metamorphoses shape
This is definitely the rarest of the three shapes Vonnegut talks about. He explains it by talking about Kafka’s Metamorphoses. In it the protagonist Gregor Samsa starts in a bad spot — he hates his job and has to provide for his whole family —and during the course of the story, starting from his initial transformation, just dips lower and lower, with the line tending towards infinity on the bad side.
It may be compared to, well, the news. Certainly this year’s. Reality can be horrible. It can be dressed up in the shape of one of the stories above, certainly, and we may ultimately find some sort of happy ending to it. But that’s just a way to see it — that’s just fiction. From our limited point of view, sometimes it does seem like things are destined to get worse and worse forever.
This works when you and the reader are both pretty worried about a particular thing, or they’re not and they should be. If you were to write an article about climate change, for example, it’d be pretty hard to avoid using this. Or about the slide towards authoritarianism of far too many modern democracies. Or Covid-19. Use it sparingly, though, and well. The world has far too many sad stories in it.
Great stories defy shapes
There’s stories that don’t really fit into any particular shape and only appear as straight lines on the graph. There’s no clearly distinguishable rising and falling. Vonnegut mentioned folk stories or creation myths as an example. And, of all things, Hamlet. In both, things simply happen, without any apparent narrative reason for the why or how. Yet they capture and interest us, because we see whatever shapes we want to see in them. A culture sees itself in its myths, Elizabethan theatre-goers and moody teens see themselves in Hamlet. This whole shape theory is the result of how people interpret stories: it’s not based on anything except our shared understanding of them. And they’re a self contained thing, a universe of their own, in which you can make it perfectly clear where’s up and what’s down. In life, we can never know for sure. Great stories recognize this, and make themselves as vibrant and full of meaning as life is.
This is how Vonnegut ends the lecture:
We are so seldom told the truth, and in Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us: we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and the bad news is. […] All we do is pretend to know.
Truly great stories often have no obviously recognizable shape. We can try to plot one onto it, but that’s exactly why they’re great: they’re open to all kinds of interpretation. They reveal something unexpected to us every time we reread them. They’re always fresh, new.
There’s no use case for this shape. It’s more of a property which grows organically than a blueprint to go for. Think of this as a hue with the other shapes as colors. The more subtle and well hidden your shape is, the more interesting your story will be.
Thank you for reading, I’m Joe. Follow me here and on twitter for stuff about tech, writing, music, game development, whatever I find interesting and worth sharing.
