I love the "per word happiness shift". I could totally see an ill-conceived startup offering a quantified self analysis tool... "with our handy all-day surveillance via your phone, we will analyze every word said by or to you and help you understand your per-word happiness shift!".
I think some people are taking exactly the opposite from this talk than what Vonnegut intended.
It is not like Vonnegut have discovered stories have different dramatic curves. This was common knowledge at the time of Aristotle. The genres Tragedy and Comedy was defined by the Greeks according to the curve of fortune: A tragedy was about bad things happening to good people (to put is succinctly) while comedy was the opposite.
So the curves of fortune have been fundamental for the understanding of drama since antiquity.
What Vonnegut is pointing out is that in Hamlet the change in fortune is actually not so clear-cut. It is often ambiguous if what happens is actually "good" or "bad". So you cant really plot it on such a curve. Hence his assertion that Shakespeare was a bad storyteller - at least according to simplified narrative models.
What he actually states is that real life is too ambiguous to plot on a god/bad curve, and that Hamlet is a masterpiece because it reflects this ambiguity.
He is not condoning Heroes Journey or other cookie-cutter narrative models.
> I think some people are taking exactly the opposite from this talk than what Vonnegut intended.
It's understandable though: Vonnegut spends more than half of the talk explaining the curves. When he comes to the really interesting point about Hamlet the connection to the first part is only loose. He only references Cinderalla and The Metamorphosis.
And this is were my real gripe is: Of all the typical comedies and tragedies of the world he could have chosen any two to make his point. But he chose The Metamorphosis which is one of the worst examples to support his point.
Sure, Gregor Samsa starts out in a bad position, but does he end worse? He doesn't seem to be concerned much about his death. Besides that everyone else in the novella ends up much better than in the beginning and the last chapter is certainly the brightest (warm sun and all).
I remember reading about how older stories - Odyssey, creation myths, god myths - are a different "sort" of story than we have now, and miss notable elements such as twists. Mysteries weren't a thing.
And, that this was because these stories were primary told through oral tradition, so you would hear the same stories over and over again. So stories that weren't enjoyable when you knew what would happen either didn't get told, or didn't last.
Now, we experience most stories only once, so things like twists work.
Thought that was an interesting idea, and Vonnegut's take on primitive stories reminded me of it.
I wonder if there's a decent correlation between the Vonnegut diagram of a movie's protagonist and the movie's box office. I'd guess that flat and monotonic downward curves are at a disadvantage, an upsloped ending an advantage. But you might be able to find interesting things about the number and intervals of minima and maxima, etc. It'd be interesting to look at the magnitude of the peaks and troughs too, but how would you calibrate the x axis across movies or between scenes?
If it works you could be as successful in Hollywood as Raffles, the barefoot executive.
Oh yeah, basically all successful manistream movies follows the same dramatic model with standardized plot points designated "inciting incident", "midpoint", "point of no return" and so on. You are not going to revolutionize Hollywood with this insight. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure
I think Vonnegut is actually satirizing this and saying truth is more important than dramatic structure. Popular fiction tend to have very clear dramatic curves, but Vonnegut is saying real life is more ambiguous.
I am really amazed at how much we talk about that 3 act structure. Basically, it says, well, you have a beginning, and then a middle, and then the story ends. Not very helpful for writers, and it is not even descriptive.
If only it told you "well, your first third is the beginning, next third middle, last third ending", but no. Actually, the second act is usually twice longer than each other, as shown in the wikipedia article, and it is usually cut in two parts, as there is a huge event in the middle ("No, I am your father"-kind-of-event). OK, so, basically, you have 4 acts, right? Why not call it a 4-act structure? And you still don't know how to structure them.
OTOH, I like Lester Dent's famous master plot formula, written in the 30s for pulp fiction short stories: https://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html . It is written for action-packed short stories, obviously, but describes pretty well the structure of most Hollywood successes, too. And it can help writers, well, write interesting stories (although it must be adapted, obviously, unless you are writing a "must defeat the villain" story).
> OK, so, basically, you have 4 acts, right? Why not call it a 4-act structure?
Because there's a fairly concrete distinction between acts in stage plays, and that's how plays using the structure are tradition broken up (act divisions in film and novels are often more metaphor than concrete, so, yeah, without the stage precedent, it would make more sense to name it for the four parts, two of which are jammed together in the three-act model.)
> And you still don't know how to structure them.
Yes, you do; the general “shape” of the structure had been described in detail for a long time; the three-act structure isn't just “a beginning, middle, and end”, it's a very particular shape (the Wikipedia page is a good brief description, but their are good sized books covering it in detail.)
> It is written for action-packed short stories, obviously, but describes pretty well the structure of most Hollywood successes, too.
Not really; it's got a lot of genre and form specific but, though it's certainly not entirely useless outside of that focus. The Writer's Journey is better for describing the shape of Hollywood successes (Save the Cat does so even more precisely for recent ones, providing very close to a minute-by-minute breakdown.)
> Because there's a fairly concrete distinction between acts in stage plays, and that's how plays using the structure are tradition broken up (act divisions in film and novels are often more metaphor than concrete, so, yeah, without the stage precedent, it would make more sense to name it for the four parts, two of which are jammed together in the three-act model.)
I don't know, lots of classical works were written with more than 3 acts, for instance lots of works from Molière, Corneille or Shakespeare consist in 5 acts. The legend says back then acts were as long as the candles lighting the scene lasted, but I don't know if it's true. If it is, it's the old equivalent of five act structure in tv series, mandated by commercials' breaks: the number of acts is determined by external reasons, not narrative ones.
> Not really; it's got a lot of genre and form specific but, though it's certainly not entirely useless outside of that focus. The Writer's Journey is better for describing the shape of Hollywood successes (Save the Cat does so even more precisely for recent ones, providing very close to a minute-by-minute breakdown.)
Yeah, I forgot about those 2 (I wrote my comment in a hurry). They are way better examples, for sure.
"Tree act structure" does not just mean that a story is split into three parts. At least as used by screenwriters, it is a term for a tried-and-true narrative structure with a lot of well-defined elements, for example that the protagonist should get a goal in the beginning which transform into a deeper personal goal, that stakes should increase and the protagonist have their deepest core challenged and so on.
I have a strange itch to write a small stage play (one act, two actors) -- even though I will probably live to see it performed. Is there anything like the master plot formula or even Campbell/Vogler/Save the cat style templates for the stage?
Realistically this kind of work has already been done. It’s usually not described in these terms but there is a lot of analysis of What Works in the field of screenwriting manuals.
“Save The Cat” is one that’s really narrowed in on What Sells. It’s not about what makes a “great” movie, it’s about what makes a movie that makes a good profit, and it’s kind of hilarious how much that book conflates profit-making films with great films. I recommend reading it with a very cynical eye as to what biases it’s author has before you go taking it as gospel.
There are a few. The AA advertisement up in the air, the counterfeiter catch me if you can, and Sophia copala’s lost in translation all spring to mind.
Not smashing successes, but sort of light stories about nothing when nothing happens.
Getting the same effect with gravity is harder. Precious might fall in that category.
I love that (well, and Breakfast of Champions) so much I could never get into his other novels much, because they're not them. Sirens was the first novel that I really connected with. I've read it so many times. "It flung them like stones." Ha, come to think of it, I was in a band called The Ghosts of Saturn, my brother was in one called CSI (ChronoSynclastic Infundibulum).. Isn't there supposed to be a movie coming out soon?
Once years ago I was in a 2nd hand bookshop in Sydney, and could hear a few staff members chatting excitedly in a back room. They were laughing over plot-points in Sirens! I listened for a long while, without revealing my presence. It was glorious. :-)
It just occurred to me to recommend to anyone who hasn't seen it the movie Gentlemen Broncos. I hadn't associated that and Sirens before, but there are many similarities. It's totally sci-fi, totally hilarious, and has a kind of Vonnegutian sugar-coated melancholy too. 5 stars!
I learned this in a creative writing workshop and now I can't never think of a story without these guidelines. Every story each time fits into one of those descriptions, even the things that I write somehow end up being a shape of a story as described by Vonnegut. I find it very helpful but at the same time exasperating.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07772
Articles about:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601848/data-mining-reveal...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/the-s...