The emotional shape of a story, by Kurt Vonnegut, with commentary by Yours F. Truly.

[khakidoggy]

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An excerpt of a longer talk; thankfully the original source provided a link to an illustrated transcript.

Hint: read the illustrated transcript after you read this. Or instead, I don't care. Vonnegut's more important than I am, but he's dead and I'm alive, so make your choice.

My academic career, long and inconclusive as it was, started with a passionate flirtation with Theatre Studies, where my exposure to semiotics profoundly changed the way I viewed fiction.

Even more interesting was the vast set of analytical tools to which I was introduced in classes on dramaturgy. How to graph relationships or plotlines.

In practice I've found these methods to be way too much work and far too square for a writing rock-and-roller like myself. But simply being taught how to think about your story from a helicopter's perspective, thinking about the significant events in a story and the slope of the emotional graph at any given point, has always stuck with me.

Here, in an illustrated transcript, Vonnegut graphs a few familiar stories with the book's chronology Beginning-End on the X axis (he selected dominantly linear stories) and Good Fortune / Ill Fortune on the Y axis.

This is such a useful tool.

Take your favorite books. You probably remember the whole of the story, so try to draw it out like Vonnegut did. Broad strokes, whole cloth.

is there a pattern to the shapes of your favorite stories?

And what if you graph the stories you've written, of which you're most proud?