Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors, but this idea (which was not accepted for his Master's thesis, iirc) was extremely limited and laughable in terms of literary theory even when he suggested it. 20th century structuralism (esp. literary semiotics) was leaps ahead even then, with the likes of Greimas, Barthes and Eco.
Seeing how Vonnegut referenced leading scholars (e.g. McLuhan) in his works, he should have known better. It is weird that he still felt that this limited approach was worthwhile.
> title talks about "8 shapes"
> graphic shows only 7 distict shapes (new testament and cinderella are identical)
Am I missing something or is this a case of sloppy editing?
I saw this on github - a machine learning model that is trained to tell fairy tales. I think Vonnegut would have liked this, these are kind of similar to the machines from Tralfamadore. Well, Trurl and Klapaucius from the Cyberiad were also machines. I wonder if these ML models will ever be up to this level of storytelling...
I'm looking forward to reading this in depth, but first: there have been many attempts to describe the 25, or 7, or 2 types of stories. My favorite, only because I can remember is, is 2:
1. A man goes on a journey
2. A stranger comes to town
Do all stories reduce to one of those? Not really, but it's interesting.
"Not really, but it's interesting." is my reaction to most of those. If you're trying to write fiction, they might help. If you're watching a TV show, you might see that the scriptwriter is slavishly following one of those, as @legohead says below.
Longer recording of the talk, later in life: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc
I highly recommend his work. It is all uniquely entertaining, most books consumable in a day or two, and some of which I find oddly terrifying (Cat's Cradle) sometimes on an existential level (Sirens of Titan). Though always always a fantastic read.
Similar to his theory, I've noticed that for there to be a great achievement by the protagonist, there has to be a great suffering first. Once I noticed this pattern, it has ruined a lot of shows for me. I can't sympathize with characters, because I know this is just part of the formula and they will soon be achieving greatness.
This reminds me of the 7 basic plots, which has always seemed interesting to me, but it also seems like it trivializes the complexity of storytelling.
I don't find this idea very compelling at all.
A good/bad axis over time doesn't really tell you anything new about the story that you don't already know, and the only information contained in the "shape" is how many times the good/bad axis is crossed (I don't see how Cinderella is more 'step shaped' than 'boy meets girl' stories). Crossing this good/bad axis already has a better concept to describe it while also encapsulating more complex story events: the plot point.
The idea is completely useless in stories with any ambiguity (most good stories), or absurdist, or anti-hero (like Taxi Driver), or conflicting narratives, or where time isn't uni-directional (such as recollections like Citizen Kane) etc.
Pfft, how about 36 basic stories?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situ...
Or 134?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson%E2%80...
Can someone explain the difference between the dramaturgy of "The New Testament" and "Cinderella"? They look identical.
The structure of stories is a fascinating topic, from Artistotle's Mythos to Propp's Morphology of the Folktale.
I'm just going to throw this out there, that until recently, we didn't necessarily have the computational tools to plot these stories algorithmically, as Vonnegut suggests doing. However, with modern language models, we surely do so at this moment.
Not that I have the time to take on more projects, but it must be reasonably easy to, say, do a sentiment analysis of the synopses of books and movies, say from IMBD, and generate these curves. I think it would be interesting to do a kind of type analysis on how many unique structures there really are.
Discussed in 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1212519 and 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18844948 and 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25452553
Man in Hole. The main character gets into trouble but winds up being better from the experience.
This is kind of like the plot of Cars where Lightening has to fix the road of a small town he wrecks. Car in Hole. I personally think I'm better from the experience because I'll be avoiding watching those movies with my kids in the future...
Life is ambiguous so we make sense of it with stories. Stories all have a point, life just is.
The idea is appealing but there is this underlying hypothesis that things that happen to the main chracter can be qualified as true or bad. I wonder what the shape of a detective story would be for instance.
PCA on high order features of a large language model
i think yall need to quit arguing about this and just go read vonnegut, it will make you feel better
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The video clip omits the most important part of Vonnegut's lecture. He does Hamlet and it's a flat line. It's odd because this is the point of the article yet the clip omits it.
See this one, for example (near the end):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_RUgnC1lm8
Vonnegut concludes:
"We don't know enough in life to know what the good news is and the bad news is."
Cinderella and the rest are fantasy. Hamlet is the truth. Life is ambiguous and stories that tell us otherwise are lying to us.
This story graph thing has been quoted out of context so many times that people have completely forgotten the point Vonnegut was trying to make.