[HN Gopher] Kurt Vonnegut on the "shapes" of stories
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Kurt Vonnegut on the "shapes" of stories
Author : aleyan
Score : 223 points
Date : 2022-07-13 19:20 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (bigthink.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bigthink.com)
| wawjgreen wrote:
| trsh wrote:
| 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.
| goto11 wrote:
| That is his point...
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| This.
|
| For those who haven't watched the video, his whole talk is
| tongue-in-cheek. The flavor of the talk is the same as the
| flavor of his writing; both worthwhile.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| 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...
|
| https://github.com/EdenBD/MultiModalStory-demo
| echelon wrote:
| This is so cool and is absolutely the direction this is going.
| tmountain wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I think it (and the 8 shapes concept) can rather deepen
| awareness of the complexity of storytelling by giving us a
| roadmap to recognize and appreciate the nuances of a skilled
| execution (how did the teller hide the features of the trope?
| How did they misdirect us? How did they approach the features
| in a new way?).
|
| Emotional responses to art are predicated on expectations
| either met or contradicted; more understanding of the
| structures of a medium leads to more active expectation
| (especially thanks to the generation of a common language with
| the artist) which can provide more gratifying depth of
| emotional response.
| bravura wrote:
| 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.
| josh2600 wrote:
| Cinderella ends happily ever after and the New Testament
| doesn't. I think it's that simple.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| Both end well for the chosen and poorly for the wicked.
| andsoitis wrote:
| You can be good and still not be chosen.
| once_inc wrote:
| Cinderella's story arc doesn't look the same to me. She is told
| from the start that she has until 12 to enjoy herself. When the
| spell wears off, she doesn't complain or even feel very sad;
| she just relishes the experience she's gone through. She's also
| never in any real danger, except for being locked in her room.
| Her stepmother also causes the glass slipper to break, but she
| still had the other to prove she was at the ball.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| I think the point is they have the same "shape", at least when
| you graph them like this.
| Barrera wrote:
| 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.
| swayvil wrote:
| Stop trying to educate me. I just want to be entertained. Tell
| me that I am smart.
| FigmentEngine wrote:
| Contextomy, happens all the time
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016344370505397...
| goto11 wrote:
| This is even explained in the article. It is the "infographic"
| which entirely misrepresent his point.
|
| The title of the article is also rather misleading. It makes is
| sound like he thinks there is exactly 8 possible shapes, while
| he is just showing some examples.
| dang wrote:
| Ah good point - we've de-eighted the title now. This is an
| obvious (except I missed it) application of the site
| guideline:
|
| _If the title contains a gratuitous number or number +
| adjective, we 'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g.
| translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing
| Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g.
| "The 5 Platonic Solids."_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| barrysteve wrote:
| Beautiful talk. Vonnegut nailed it.
|
| Hamlet was the truth of his time. There is meaning to life and
| stories about life that you can't describe as lying.
|
| _" We don't know enough in life to know what the good news is
| and the bad news is."_
|
| We won't know the answer to this challenge for a very long
| time.
| shagie wrote:
| Note that at the same time he refutes his earlier part about
| the stories of primitive people (as he put it) who had
| stories that were completely flat (
| https://youtu.be/4_RUgnC1lm8?t=2470 ).
| 0xBABAD00C wrote:
| > We won't know the answer to this challenge for a very long
| time.
|
| This is essentially the "halting problem", or the "principle
| of computational irreducibility", or whatever equivalent
| formulation you want to pick. We'll never know the answer --
| for most computations there are no shortcuts to predict their
| outcomes.
| [deleted]
| progre wrote:
| 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...
| marttt wrote:
| Or 31 basic structural elements? Identified in Russian folk
| tales by folklorist Vladimir Propp:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp#Narrative_struc...
| silicon2401 wrote:
| I was going to post that folklore framework. I love initiatives
| to formally catalogue and index everyday, organic, non-
| quantitative things like stories. Does anyone know of similar
| efforts in any other fields?
| pklausler wrote:
| There's also the late Blake Snyder's _Save The Cat_ tenfold
| classification scheme for screenplays, which can be useful at
| least for ameliorating a bad movie watching experience by
| leading to debates over which one of the ten categories you
| just saw.
|
| On the other hand, if you know his categories, it can take away
| from the enjoyment of films; once you know you're watching a
| movie of a specific category, it's easy to anticipate the rest
| of the plot.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Or only one bit: rise/fall. Most stories have 2 or 3 bits, some
| have so many that you can't get a meaningful average.
| latexr wrote:
| Longer recording of the talk, later in life:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=GOGru_4z1Vc
| dantyti wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp
| bmitc wrote:
| Have you read his thesis?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > he should have known better.
|
| This is a sign that you may not have outsmarted him, he may
| have outsmarted you. Of course, that's a communication failure
| on his part, but when you're speaking to a large audience the
| failure to communicate your idea is measured as a percentage of
| the audience, not a boolean.
| tomgp wrote:
| I'm not sure he did, at least not in terms of serious,
| academic, literery theory but you can perhaps see how it might
| be a useful heuristic for an author in terms of thinking about
| what type of story they want ot write. Vonnegut was always
| throwing half baked ideas into the public realm just to see
| where they'd land and that's a large part of his appeal for me
| (c.f. the stories of Kilgore Trout).
|
| This shapes of stories thing that resurfaces every so often is
| kind of perfect for internet amplification, it's easy to grasp
| there's the potential for some nice pictures and Vonnegut is
| always engaging as a both speaker and a writer. I'd read his
| essay on the topic in the 90s because I'm a Vonnegut completist
| but at the time I don't think it was considered anything other
| than a minor flight of fancy. It's kind of a shame that things
| like this and DFWs "this is watter" speech which are kind of
| easily graspable tend ot eclipse the more interesting stuff.
| Though maybe it's a gateway.
| goto11 wrote:
| It is definitely not supposed to be taken at face value. He
| explicitly mentions that Hamlet cannot be graphed like this -
| it is too ambiguous whether the events are "good fortune" or
| "ill fortune". He concludes that "Shakespeare was a poor
| storyteller".
|
| His actual point is that we don't know enough to tell whether
| events are actually good or ill fortune, and therefore stories
| like Cinderella (or the Bible) does not reflect the ambiguities
| of real life.
| SamBam wrote:
| > He concludes that "Shakespeare was a poor storyteller".
|
| He certainly does not, or, if he says those words, he's being
| deliberately facetious.
|
| He says: "I have in fact told you why this is respected as a
| masterpiece. We are so seldom told the truth. In Hamlet,
| Shakespeare tells us we don't know enough about life to know
| what the good news is and what the bad news is, and we
| respond to that. Thank you, Bill."
| legohead wrote:
| 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.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Suffering through and overcoming challenges on the way to
| victory/triumph/transformation is as old as the earliest myths,
| and is often called "The Hero's Journey":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey
|
| If you want to learn more, you might enjoy Joseph Campbell's
| _The Hero with a Thousand Faces_ :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces
| progre wrote:
| Same for me except I started to notice characters that get no
| or very little backstory. Then I just sit and wait for them to
| die. Stupid brain.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| This is Ebert's "Law of Economy of Characters" - "Movie
| budgets make it impossible for any film to contain
| unnecessary characters. Therefore, all characters in a movie
| are necessary to the story--even those who do not seem to
| be."
| cestith wrote:
| In particular if it's a serialized piece, like episodic
| television, and you meet "an old friend" of a major
| protagonist character (or in Star Trek a commissioned officer
| on the finitely-staffed ship) they've never mentioned before,
| the new character often literally exists to be a source of
| adversity and loss for the major character.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| 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.
| ysavir wrote:
| I've heard it broken down into those two before. It's an
| interesting take, but one that I don't think aptly describes
| the "two stories". My own take on "there are two types of
| stories" is:
|
| 1. Something must change
|
| 2. Change needs to be prevented
|
| Just about every story boils down to one of those concepts, and
| how the characters respond to the needed/pending change.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| > 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?
| xiande04 wrote:
| I thought the same. Sloppy editing. If you watch the included
| video, the graph that Vonnegut draws for Cinderella starts
| below the B/E axis, not above like the New Testament.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Ah that makes sense wrt the story arc for cinderella. Thanks.
| I instinctively ignore everything that looks like a video
| when reading articles.
| soperj wrote:
| in this case it's the best part of the article, they also
| unfortunately cut the video.
| goto11 wrote:
| Vonnegut is not saying there are only 8 possible shapes, he is
| just graphing some examples.
| bmitc wrote:
| This is correct. His actual thesis has 28 example story
| shapes.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Hamlet would graph as a straight line along the Beginning-
| Entropy axis.
| willidiots wrote:
| I suspect the author wanted you to notice the similarity
| between 7 and 8 when you got to them, not at the beginning of
| the article.
| lazyant wrote:
| 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
| zupatol wrote:
| Life is ambiguous so we make sense of it with stories. Stories
| all have a point, life just is.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| I love stories and movies that are kind of just like "man a
| bunch of shit just happened, is there really a lesson? who
| knows" (like Burn After Reading for a comedic example).
|
| There doesn't have to be a "point" for there to be beauty or
| something to learn from people and their lives and experiences,
| fictional or not.
| smugma wrote:
| As Vonnegut wrote extensively in Slaughterhouse Five: "So it
| goes."
| unixhero wrote:
| Life just is.
|
| Profound!
| drewcoo wrote:
| So it goes.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/questions/251943-what-does-so-
| it-g...
| naillo wrote:
| PCA on high order features of a large language model
| ineedasername wrote:
| 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.
| veryfancy wrote:
| Slapstick is a favorite.
| _gtly wrote:
| Great choices. Welcome to the Monkey House is pretty great,
| too.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| Or to take the shapes and generate stories that fit.
|
| Visual character arcs, plotlines, mood, pacing, tension, etc.
| curiousllama wrote:
| A friend did this for a school project! It was super cool -
| Harry potter was cool because the later books took on different
| shapes, which to me showed one of the reasons such a simple set
| of stories got so popular (Book 1 is Cinderella; Book 5 is
| Kafka; Book 7 is "Man in a Hole", etc.).
|
| But ultimately, on real data, what it boiled down to is "there
| are only so many general shapes you can plot in 2D." It
| apparently became a very manual visualization process: the
| normalization problems (book length, length of good/bad bits,
| etc.) from different texts swamped any new shapes one could
| conceivably identify using the method.
| toto444 wrote:
| 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.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| a detective story would naturally take the shape of Which Way
| is Up
| soapdog wrote:
| In many detective stories, the detective is not the main
| character. They are the point-of-view, but act more like a
| force of nature passing through the story unchanged while
| someone else is going through a complex character arc while
| witnessing the unfolding of the story.
| dwringer wrote:
| I would argue every story has a vast, seemingly infinite*
| number of shapes, limited only by our ability to model
| objectives toward which events can be classified as positive or
| negative. Still, that doesn't make it a useless method of
| analysis because we can find objectives that can be applied
| across stories in a somewhat universal way. Or, authors can
| simply come up with objectives that they think might be
| interesting.
|
| *I suppose these numbers would be combinatorically constrained
| by a function of the number of graphemes/phonemes, and not
| actually infinite, but still huge.
| goto11 wrote:
| > there is this underlying hypothesis that things that happen
| to the main chracter can be qualified as true or bad.
|
| Vonneguts point is actually the opposite:
|
| > In Hamlet, Shakespeare tells us we don't know enough about
| life to know what the good news is and what the bad news is,
| and we respond to that.
| [deleted]
| havblue wrote:
| 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...
| number6 wrote:
| Avoid almost all western stories then, especially the ancient
| Greek dramas
| seanccox wrote:
| 'Stranger Things', 'Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels',
| 'The Usual Suspects', 'Pulp Fiction'... all immediately come
| to mind as man-in-hole stories.
|
| Reductive/deconstructive literary criticism helps highlight
| novel elements of the subject story. I can't fathom being
| upset about it, but then again, I didn't watch 'Cars'. Maybe
| it is a particularly bad movie?
| coredog64 wrote:
| It's "Doc Hollywood" except the people are now automobiles.
| seanccox wrote:
| Lightning McQueen is even the same color as the doc's
| car.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i think yall need to quit arguing about this and just go read
| vonnegut, it will make you feel better
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