What's the shape of your story?

What's the story? #2 - why storytelling will always be the key to building great brands.

The great American writer Kurt Vonnegut knew more than a little about storytelling. His most famous book, Slaughterhouse Five, is widely regarded as one of the best novels of the twentieth century.

Based on his own experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden, during the devastating firebombing, it is a story of time and space travel, and the horrors of war.

Vonnegut wrote many other novels and short stories, and through doing so developed a theory about storytelling: that all stories had a shape. More precisely: he said that you could take any story – from Cinderella to American Psycho – and it would conform to one of eight particular shapes, that could be plotted on a graph.

The X (or horizontal) axis, represents ‘time’ – from beginning to end.The Y (or vertical) axis represents fortune: from ‘good’ down to ‘bad.’

He starts off with a simple example of a perennial story: ‘Boy Meets Girl.”

The story begins with the boy experiencing fairly neutral fortune, which very quickly turns better, when he does meet the girl. But then of course it nosedives as he loses her, before starting to pick up again as he works to win her back. Ending happily ever after. It has kind of a sine wave shape.

Vonnegut describes seven more shapes, and recent scientific analysis of thousands of stories has proved that his theory is pretty much right. Give or take a shape or two.

The best advertising tells great stories, but as we churn them out even more relentlessly now, with the help of AI, they just become slop. And why do we call it ‘slop?’ Because it has no form, structure, or substance.

The shape of stories was significant, Vonnegut believed, as they tell us a bigger story about the societies that produce them – from prehistoric to post-industrial. What would he have said about one that produces so many stories with no shape at all?

But AI in itself is not the bad guy in this story. It can help us tell stories in ever more incredible ways, and tell more of them, that will captivate audiences and consumers alike. But only if we still take the time and effort to think about their shape. So it goes.

See Kurt Vonnegut telling his story here: https://lnkd.in/ePKv-ShN