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 he 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. The video is an intriguing look into the mind of a highly original writer and gives excellent insights into the basics of storytelling. - YouTube www.youtube.com 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 tories, 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, anything can create anything that feels new.This story originally appeared two years ago. It has since been updated.

A fearless tour.

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Below is a podcast series which focuses on health and well-being solutions for children.  Over four episodes, Million Activating Miracles discusses childhood anxiety, autism, ADD and ADHD, vaccine injuries, and natural and […] The post ‘Children’s Health Solutions’ discusses anxiety, ADD, ADHD and vaccine injuries in children first appeared on The Expose.

'This is clearly trying to intentionally manipulate the minds of Americans,' says Karoline Leavitt.

by Chris Menahan, Information Liberation: What are the odds this was done without extensive US intelligence? I’d say next to zero. (Above tweets compiled by ZeroHedge.) From ABC News, “Ukraine targets Russian airfields in major drone attack”: The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) conducted a large-scale operation targeting four Russian military airfields on Sunday, an SBU source […]

by Peter Koenig, Global Research: President Trump’s deal-making trip to the Middle East, more precisely at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Riyadh in mid-May 2025, was a multi-purpose trip. First, Saudi Arabia signed a $142 billion arms deal with the US and pledged an additional $600 billion in American investments. That’s deal-making at its best. Second, […]

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