Its impossible to quantify what, exactly, makes a good story.
In this video, author Kurt Vonnegut demonstrates these arcs by drawing them.
This idea was recently investigated by researchers at theComputational Story Labat theUniversity of Vermont.
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 dont need to fear unoriginality quite as much as you might think.
Storytelling isnt about saying literally everything in a new way.
Its about remixing the ideas weve seen before in new ways.
Plenty of writers have become successful not by reinventing genres, but by telling new stories within that framework.
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.
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 viaTechnology Review
