It’s impossible to quantify what, exactly, makes a good story. However, underneath most popular stories, there are only a handful of familiar story arcs that we tell over and over again. In this video, author Kurt Vonnegut demonstrates these arcs by drawing them.


As Vonnegut, author of New York Times best-seller Slaughterhouse-Five, explains, the core shape of many stories are so simple that they can be rendered on a simple chart. Writers change important elements like setting, characters, and the specifics of what causes the arcs, but these shapes form a sort of “skeleton” for the story.

This idea was recently investigated by researchers at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont. Here, researchers examined the emotional arcs of over 1,700 stories and came up with six core trajectories that most of those stories followed. For all the differences that the individual stories had, the emotional arcs were all too familiar.


So, what can that tell an aspiring creative writer? For starters, it says that you don’t need to fear “unoriginality” quite as much as you might think. Storytelling isn’t about saying literally everything in a new way. It’s about remixing the ideas we’ve seen before in new ways. Plenty of writers have become successful not by reinventing genres, but by telling new stories within that framework. Most of us have seen plenty of rags-to-riches stories, and most of us are equally likely to see and enjoy another one like it at some point in our lives.

It can also help to examine these shapes to get a starting point to work from. Some of the greatest and most controversial work starts with a basic framework and deconstructs it. Game of Thrones, for example, frequently undermines the notion of a happy ending, cutting off plotlines (and heads) in places we’d never expect. Only by examining the way we tell stories already can we tell stories in new and different ways.

Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories | YouTube via Technology Review