Seemingly complex things are often simpler when understood.
This applies to many things.
For example, great writing is diverse and nuanced ... but its underlying structure isn't.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a number of "Classics", including Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Sirens of Titan.
For all his great writing, and all the complexities, he simplified stories into a few basic story shapes.
Here is a graphic that explains the concept.
Here is a 17-minute video of Vonnegut discussing his theory of the Shape of Stories. You can get the basic concepts in the first 7 minutes ... but he is witty and the whole video is worth watching.
You can explore a bit more elaborate version of his "Shapes of Stories" from his rejected Master's thesis from the University of Chicago.
Vonnegut's idea was fulfilled not too long ago--a computer was used to identify story shapes. Researchers extracted the emotional trajectories of 1,327 stories and discovered that there are six core emotional arcs:
- Rags to riches (a rise)
- Tragedy (a fall)
- Man in a hole (fall, then a rise)
- Icarus (rise, then a fall)
- Cinderella (rise, then a fall, then a rise)
- Oedipus (fall, then a rise, then a fall)
For more on writing from Kurt Vonnegut:
