Kurt Vonnegut and Story Shapes

Kurt Vonnegut’s rejected master’s thesis was on the shapes of storylines. I saw the above video many years ago, and was fascinated by the visual representation of words. I tend to draw graphs in my head for complex concepts in my life myself, because that’s the way I think. So to see someone such as Kurt Vonnegut do the same for story lines, literally story arcs in some cases, made me giddy.

Just a week ago, io9 (there they go again) published a story about someone carrying it one bit further, making pretty info graphics for the story shapes. That someone is Maya Eilam, a graphic artist. It’s probably not kosher to reprint her image here, so I encourage you all to visit one of the links in this paragraph to see the real thing.

And here’s a lovely graphic of his concepts.