The shape of stories
For each story, choose the curve that best describes the hero’s fortunes, from beginning to end.
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Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse-Five, suggested drawing stories: the hero’s good or bad fortune going up and down, time running from left to right.
In 2016, researchers at the University of Vermont analyzed the emotional arc of more than 1,300 novels: nearly all of them follow one of six simple shapes, such as “Rags to riches,” “Icarus” or “Cinderella.”
Our favorite stories are emotional roller coasters, and their shapes can almost be counted on the fingers of one hand.
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Sources
- Andrew Reagan et al., “The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes,” EPJ Data Science, 2016.