Blueprint - the Shape of Your Story
You wouldn’t try to build a house without a blueprint would you? Even the HGTV remodeling power couple, Chip and Joanna Gaines, starts with a basic frame of house and then turn it into a home (anyone catch the chicken coop remodel they did? It was basically a complete tear down - no unlike the revision process a writer goes through after the first, second, third...draft).
A writer constructs and revises a novel very much like an architect, builder and renovation specialist approaches a house. The details of the dwelling need to be considered: tile, flooring, roof, windows, countertops, faucets, tubs, paint colors need to be decided upon for a home become an actuality - whether it be new construction or remodel; likewise the writer needs to decide:
What does the protagonist want? What’s wounding event?
Who is the Narrator?
The Voice, POV, Perspective?
Setting?
Dialogue?
Subtext?
Time?
These are but a few many other significant decisions you as writer will make when it comes to constructing and later revising your novel.
Shiplap, subway tiles and grey grout aside - you need to start with an initial blueprint or a the very least a sketch of what the building is going to look like. Even if it’s just something drawn on a napkin - it is still a basic starting point for the builder to follow.
What if you could have a similar “napkin-like” sketch for your novel? And what if - just like those classic design elements in homes (hardwood floors, open floor plans) - what if you could know that your plot/your narrative arc would be a popular one? One way to ensure your book will hit the mark in terms of narrative arcs or plot is to consider Kurt Vonnegut’s story graphs.
Vonnegut set forth his ideas about story shapes in his autobiographical Palm Sunday. Previously, he had submitted the idea as his thesis in anthropology to the University of Chicago. His contention: “the fundamental idea is that stories have shapes that can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or its spearheads.” The thesis was interestingly rejected. In part Vonnegut suspects because it looked like too much fun.
In Palm Sunday Vonnegut sets down what the various shapes of these popular stories look like in graph form. These story shapes or graphs you may view Vonnegut himself explain on Youtube watch it here ; it’s worth it.
Seeing stories as graphs has of course attracted the interest of the AI (artificial intelligence) community. The University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide set out to do just this - feed stories into a computer and have the computer create graphs. (Vonnegut created his by hand.) The researchers were not just interested in the plot of the stories but of the emotional movement within the story. As Andrew Reagan, lead author of UVMs paper on the subject states: “We’re not imposing a set of shapes,Rather: the math and machine learning have identified them.”
What they found was: “There are several theories that say every story known to man can be reduced to one of just a handful of archetypes—a quest, overcoming the monster, rebirth, to name a few—but there’s no consensus on what those stories are. In this case, researchers picked six from a mix of popular lists based on what shapes the computer identified most. And though the researchers were focused on a book’s emotional arc—not the structure of its plot, per se—they found overlap in how plot points reflected emotional highs and lows as measured by the sentiment analysis."(LaFrance, the Atlantic)
Professor Matt Jockers of the University of Nebraska is also looking at the proposition that the the shape of stories is actually combination of “sentiment and plot shape”. He too set out to answer the questions: are there archetype story shapes? And if so how many?according to Dan Piepenbring in his article for the Paris Review . Piepenbring writes Jockers concluded there are roughly six archetype story shapes. Jockers is focused more on the sentiment of narratives. “In other words, a book’s plot isn’t necessarily about conflict and resolution, but emotions, which “serve as proxies for the narrative movement,” as Jockers writes. This is an attractive approach to plot, in part because it allows us to ascertain—and to defend, if need be—the “plottiness” of certain books that tend to be regarded as plotless.” (Piepenbring) Jockers relied upon the negative and positive responses to various words by people/readers and then in turn this data was fed into the computers to create the shape of the story or the points of the story which create the shape. Likewise, the UVM and University of Adelaide study also used positive and negative responses to words in its study and also confirmed the actual archetype shapes as numbering six.
But what of Vonnegut? And his contention that the Cinderella story was the most popular story shape? Well, as Vonnegut points out he didn’t want to include the Cinderella story in his thesis for fear it reduce his thesis as being non-academic. The Cinderella story Vonnegut admits many consider “trash” but then he looked at it again and saw the Cinderella graph was very similar to the creation myth graph that every society seems have in one form or another. (Palm Sunday Kindle edition page 288) In fact he found the story of Cinderella was the most popular of stories as he says in his lecture it’s a story that is being retold many times a day and is guaranteed to make you a “million dollars” because it’s so popular.
It would appear that Vonnegut was on to something:
The business community too is now considering the application of story graphs to business. Consider the Harvard Business Reviews article on Vonnegut’s story shapes and the rise and fall of businesses and platforms. This link to Harvard Business Review actually takes Vonnegut’s story graphs for: the man in the hole, Boy Meets Girl and the Cinderella story and offers up instances in business where the particular business has followed a similar or same such arc. Or consider the application of such story graphs/narratives are applied to Design. Ellen Lupton http://elupton.com/ a senior curator of Cooper Hewitt does this in her new book Design is Storytelling .
Whether you’re writing or revising your novel - you’ll need a plan or at least a sketch of what you’re going to create. So why not borrow a graph from Vonnegut’s now famously rejected thesis on the shape of a story. It’s a start - more than that it's design plan.
