Iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut’s simple graphs show how to write the 3 stories everyone loves |
To be a great fiction writer requires understanding basic story structures and being clever enough to disguise them so your audience doesn’t know they’re watching or reading something they’ve seen before. Academics suggest that there are only a finite number of plots and structures, but that number varies based on who’s doing the talking.
Writer Kurt Vonnegut, best known for his satirical works on American politics and culture, including “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “Sirens of Titan,” was obsessed with the shapes of stories and summed up his views in one powerful sentence: “The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.”
What are the shapes of stories?
In the video below, Vonnegut explains the shapes of three different types of stories. The first one he starts with is “person gets into trouble.”
The first question is where the main character or protagonist starts their journey. Are they in a state of good or bad fortune, and how does that change from beginning to end? The arc of this story is simple, someone starts off in good fortune, they get into trouble, and then find their way out. “Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it,” Vonnegut says with a smirk.
The second is called “boy gets girl,” which is the basics of the story: someone finds something “wonderful,” their life is on an upward trajectory, then they trail downwards until they can get the girl or boy back. He finishes with the “most popular story” of Western civilization, and that is “Cinderella.”What’s interesting about the story is that it’s about a poor little girl whose mother has died, and her life is pure misery. But her story has a massive upswing when she meets her fairy godmother and can go to the ball. But once the clock strikes midnight, her life crashes down in a matter of seconds.
Vonnegut’s eerie prediction about AI
What’s interesting is that at the beginning of the video, Vonnegut notes that stories are relatively “simple” and that they should be able to be plugged into computers that could then regurgitate the same story over and over again. It almost feels like an eerie predictor of artificial intelligence. “There’s no reason why the simple shapes of a story can’t be fed into computers. They are beautiful shapes,” Vonnegut says. “Now this is an exercise in relativity, really. It’s the shape of the curves are what matters, and not their origins.”
After seeing Vonnegut map out the basic plotlines of stories, it’s hard not to see them every time you watch a movie or TV show. It is amazing that, because there are so few characters and plot arcs in modern storytelling, anyone can create anything that feels new.
This story originally appeared three years ago. It has since been updated.
While a bottle of bubbles might seem out of place in a hospital setting, you might be surprised to learn that, for thousands of children around the world born with cleft lip and palate, they can be a helpful tool in comprehensive cleft care. Lilia, who was born with cleft lip and palate in 2020, is one of the many patients who received this care.
As a toddler, Lilia underwent two surgeries to treat cleft lip and palate with Operation Smile’s surgical program in Puebla, Mexico. Because of Operation Smile’s comprehensive care, it wasn’t long before her personality transformed: Lilia went from a quiet and withdrawn toddler to an exuberant, curious explorer, babbling, expressing herself with a variety of sounds, and engaging with others like any child her age.
Lilia is now a healthy five-year-old, with the same cheerful attitude and boundless energy. Her progress is the result of care at every level, from surgery to speech therapy to ongoing support at home—but it’s also evidence that small, sustained interventions throughout it all can make a meaningful difference.
Cleft Conditions: A Global Problem
Since 1982, Operation Smile has provided cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries to more than 500,000 patients worldwide with the help of generous volunteers and donors. Cleft conditions are congenital conditions, meaning they are present at birth. With cleft lip and palate, the lip or the roof of the mouth do not form fully during fetal development. Cleft conditions put children at risk for malnutrition and poor weight gain, since their facial structure can make feeding challenging. But cleft conditions can have an enormous social impact as well: Common difficulties with speech can leave kids socially isolated and unable to meet the same developmental milestones as their peers.
Surgery is a vital step in treating cleft conditions, but it’s also just one part of a much larger solution. Organizations like Operation Smile emphasize the importance of multi-disciplinary teams that provide comprehensive, long-term care to patients across many years. This approach, which includes oral care, speech therapy, nutritional support, and psychosocial care, not only aids in physical recovery from surgery but also helps children develop the skills and confidence to eat easily, speak clearly, and engage in everyday life. This ensures that each patient receives the full range of support they need to thrive.
A Playful (and Powerful) Solution
Throughout a patient’s care, simple tools like bubbles can play a meaningful role from start to finish.
Immediately before surgery, children are often in a new and unfamiliar environment far from home, some of them experiencing a hospital setting for the first time. When care providers or loved ones blow bubbles, it’s a simple yet effective technique: Not only are the children soothed and distracted, the bubbles also help create a sense of joy and playfulness that eases their anxiety.
In speech therapy, bubbles can take on an even more important role. Blowing bubbles requires controlled airflow, as well as the ability to form a rounded “O” shape with the lips, which are skills that children with cleft conditions may struggle to develop. Practicing these skills with bubbles allows children to gently strengthen their facial muscles, improve breath control, and support the motor skills needed for speech development. Beyond that, blowing bubbles can help kids connect with their parents or providers in a way that’s playful, comforting, and accessible even for very young patients.
Finally, bubbles often follow patients with cleft conditions home in the “smile bags” that each patient receives when the surgical procedure is finished. Smile bags, which help continue speech therapy outside of the hospital setting, can contain language enrichment booklets, a mirror, oxygen tubing, and bubbles. While regular practice with motor skills can help with physical recovery, small acts of play help as well, giving kids space to simply enjoy themselves and join in on what peers are able to do.
Bubbles at Home and Beyond
Today, because of Operation Smile’s dedication to comprehensive cleft care, Lilia is now able to make friends and speak clearly, all things that could have been difficult or impossible before. Instead of a childhood defined by limitation, Lilia—and others around the world—can look forward to a childhood filled with joy, learning, discovery, friends, and new possibilities.
CTA: Lilia’s life was changed for the better with the care she received through Operation Smile. Find out how you can make an impact in other children’s lives by visiting operationsmile.org today.
We see many symbols in our everyday lives that we likely don’t pay much attention to: the @ in our email addresses, for instance, or the % in our weather forecasts. But do we ever wonder where these symbols came from? Why they look like they do? Or how they came to mean what they mean?
One of the most commonly used symbols that most of us are clueless about is the dollar sign ($). Why does it have an “S” if there’s no “s” in “dollar”? Is there supposed to be one line or two? And where did the $ symbol even originate?
As educator and etymology enthusiast Rob Watts (better known as RobWords on YouTube) explains, the answers to those questions are surprisingly complicated.
The first written use of the dollar sign as we know it appeared in a handwritten letter sent by a man in New Orleans in 1778. Some may be under the impression that the $ is an amalgamation of “U” and “S,” as in United States, but nope. Its origin isn’t actually from the United States at all.
The international origins of the U.S. dollar start in Spain
In fact, we have to take a whole international tour through hundreds of years of currency history to arrive at what we think is the origin of the $. As Watts shares, we don’t know with 100% certainty.
The story begins with the Spanish real, the silver coin that served as the currency of Spain in the 14th century. A larger coin, worth eight times the value of the real, became known as a “piece of eight” in English. Those pieces of eight made their way to the Americas through colonialism in the 15th and 16th centuries.
“The discovery of huge, gleaming reserves of silver in Central and South America meant that they could also be made there, too,” Watts shares. “At the local mints, they took on a new name as well, based on the fixed weights of silver they were made from. They became known as the ‘peso,’ meaning ‘unit of weight.’”
Because of their reliability and divisibility into smaller units, these pesos started being used not just in the Spanish-speaking colonies, but in British colonies in the Caribbean and North America as well.
Hold the peso thought. We’ll come back to it momentarily.
The word “dollar” can be traced back to the German Joachimsthaler coin
In the meantime, another coin of similar value from the German town of Joachimsthal had gained traction in Europe.
“In precisely the same way that a round slab of beef from Hamburg became known as a hamburger, this round slab of silver from Joachimsthal became known as a Joachimsthaler,” Watts explains. “And in exactly the same way that a hamburger is sometimes just called a ‘burger,’ a Joachimsthaler was sometimes just called a ‘thaler.’”
“Thaler” became “daalder” in the Netherlands, “daler” in parts of Scandinavia, and “dollar” in the English-speaking world.
But that dollar wasn’t the dollar we ended up with.
“By 1700, the thaler had been adapted to have almost exactly the same silver content as another coin that was competing for usage in Europe: the ‘piece of eight’ or peso,” says Watts. “And so, to help differentiate between the two similarly valued coins, people started referring to the peso as ‘the Spanish dollar.’ This Spanish dollar was the de facto currency of the Americas right up until the American Revolution.”
The dollar sign actually comes from the peso symbol
Prior to declaring independence from Britain, the U.S. used the British pound for accounting. But the Spanish dollar, or peso, was the coin most often used as currency,........