Tag Archives: Kurt Vonnegut

Taking Vonnegut’s Story Shape Theory Further

Is it possible to depict all story plots in graphical form? If you could, would you find some graph shapes more common than others? The late author Kurt Vonnegut thought so.

In 2004, he gave a lecture describing his system and that talk is so good, you ought to watch the video, at least the part starting at minute 38. He’s entertaining. Someone has animated Vonnegut’s graphs at this delightful website.

His lecture covers several basic story types illustrating a protagonist’s experiences of good or ill fortune as ups and downs on the graph. If the author writes well, the reader will feel uplifted during the ‘good fortune’ periods and sad during the ‘ill fortune’ portions.

The main story types Vonnegut presents in his lecture are ‘Man in a Hole,’ ‘Boy Meets Girl,’ ‘Cinderella,’ and ‘Metamorphosis.’ Watch the video to hear his descriptions of each one.

Vonnegut comments that we humans often struggle to recognize and appreciate times of good fortune in our own lives. Therefore, I think, we often experience, and can relate to, the uncertainty of Hamlet.

Then Vonnegut’s system breaks down. He tries to illustrate Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and ends up drawing a boring, straight line. Since Hamlet doesn’t know if the ghost he’s seeing is real, or significant, he spends much of the play in a state of uncertainty, not knowing if he’s experiencing good fortune or ill fortune.

Still, it is possible to depict uncertainty on a graph. Scientists use error bands, often shown as shaded areas.

My graph is one possible way to depict the uncertainty faced by Hamlet. In general, readers don’t like uncertain characters or vagueness about their state of mind. If a character doesn’t know if her life is good or bad at a given moment, the reader could dismiss her as being stupid.

With a skilled writer, like Shakespeare, however, we understand Hamlet’s confusion and sympathize with him. We don’t think he’s dimwitted or insane, despite his attempts to feign madness.

You can depict uncertainty on a Vonnegut-style story graph. In fact, I think the entire mystery genre involves uncertainty to some extent. For much of these stories, the detective can’t tell if a given clue gets her closer to solving the case or not. The detective strives to diminish uncertainty until the end.

I’ll leave you with one more observation about Vonnegut’s graphs. I don’t believe the ones he covered in his lecture constitute the only possible graphs, and I think he would have agreed. Story graphs may take any shape, but some (the ones he showed) work better with readers than others.

In the end, it’s the writing that matters. It’s how you convey the emotional highs and lows to the reader that counts. If you tell a good story, you can make almost any graph shape work.

This concludes your combined Math and Language Arts classes for the day, thanks to your favorite professor—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 5, 2023Permalink

Want to be a Character in Your Own Book?

When authors write themselves in as characters in their fiction, we call it ‘self-insertion.’ Why and when might you try this literary technique?

The list of authors who’ve done this includes names you’ve heard of— Dante Alighieri, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Kurt Vonnegut, Stan Lee, Clive Cussler, Stephen King, and Daniel Handler (writing as Lemony Snicket). Pretty good company.

The technique varies. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dante made himself the main character. He used self-insertion to give the book more credibility, to imitate a nonfictional account of an actual journey.

For Stan Lee, Clive Cussler, and others, self-insertion serves a comedic purpose. The author/character assumes a minor role in the narrative, a cameo. The character may offer a humorous comment about the plot, setting, or protagonist. In Cussler’s books, the character named Cussler often gives the protagonist some useful information, serving as a self-named Deus ex Machina.

One of the strangest uses of self-insertion appears in an experimental novel by the French author Charles de Fieux De Mouhy (1701-1784) in his novel Lamékis, or The Extraordinary Travels of an Egyptian in the Interior Land; with the Discovery of the Isle of Sylphides. I haven’t read it, but others say the novelist enters the book as a character about halfway through. The book’s other characters recognize him as the author of the book they’re in, and berate him about the falsehoods he’s written. When characters realize they’re in a book, that’s called ‘breaking the fourth wall.’

The technique of self-insertion differs from the related term, ‘author surrogate.’ That’s when a character (usually not sharing the author’s name) speaks for, or otherwise resembles, the author. In the broad sense of this term, you might see this in nearly every work of fiction. At some point, a character offers an observation sounding more like the author than the character. A beginning writer may use the technique without intending to, because it’s difficult to get out of one’s own head and think like someone else.

Back to self-insertion. However quirky the technique may seem to readers, it comes with obvious advantages for the writer. You don’t have to invent this character’s name, or draw up a personality profile, or ponder what the character might say or do at any point. You know all those things already.

The danger lies in representing a self-inserted character as better than the writer really is. Such a character may always look right, say the right thing, and act the right way. In short—flawless, perfect. Readers find such characters unrealistic, whether self-inserted or not.

Self-insertion works best for stories set in a contemporary time period. That is, while the author is alive. Inserting yourself into historical fiction or future fiction would seem weird, but might work as humor, or as part of a philosophical reality-questioning work like De Mouhy’s Lamékis.

The technique might strike you as bordering on egotism, or as crossing way over that border. That’s why many authors who use it go for the comedy aspect. (Yes, I’m vain, but I’m poking fun at myself.) I see it more as wish fulfillment—an author loving the story and yearning to be in it.

“Time to wrap this up, don’t you think?”

Um, who are you?

“Don’t you recognize me? I’m Steve Southard, the main character of this blogpost.”

This isn’t fiction. You don’t belong here. I’m the narrator, and writer, and I say what belongs in this post. You don’t.

“Too bad. I’m here, and it’s time we signed off with my other name—

Poseidon’s Scribe”

March 5, 2023Permalink

The Swooper/Basher Dichotomy

While reading Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Timequake recently, I noted he classified writers into two groups: Swoopers and Bashers. He said women tend to be swoopers and men tend to be bashers, adding, “Someone should look into this.” Let’s look into it.

Most writers are familiar with another grouping: plotters and pantzers, but that’s not what Vonnegut was driving at. He wasn’t distinguishing between those who outline and those who don’t. His alternatives focused on the speed of writing a first draft and the number of subsequent drafts.

Swooper

He said swoopers “…write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work.”

Basher

By contrast, bashers “…go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done, they’re done.”

Several bloggers have interesting things to say about the swooper/basher contrast, including Shannon Alberta, Philip Martin, Edmund Schubert, Paula Marais, and David Duhr.

Vonnegut himself claimed to be a basher. Why he chose the terms ‘swooper’ and ‘basher’ is a mystery to me. I can see how writing first drafts quickly might suggest swooping, but writing each sentence carefully doesn’t bring the verb bashing to my mind.

Note that neither method relieves you of the need for meticulous, word-by-word editing. It’s just that bashers do that up front, in the first draft, while swoopers edit in later drafts.

In any case, I doubt there is any gender distinction between the two. I suspect the real dividing point has to do with experience. My guess is that beginning writers tend to be swoopers and many of them become bashers later on.

Early on, a writer has no reputation to lose, and thus feels great freedom to experiment and play with words. Such a writer might have a tenuous grasp of the vision for the story, and therefore must write the first draft at breakneck speed to capture that idea in words before it flies away.

Later in life, after having many stories published and developing a readership, that same writer must be more careful. Readers have come to expect a certain style from the author and deviations aren’t appreciated. There is no longer a need to experiment and play to find out what will work in the marketplace. Moreover, such an author has learned, through experience, how to keep the entire story in mind while crafting each sentence in order.

My theory that beginners tend to be swoopers and veterans to be bashers is, itself, an over-generalization. In the end, it’s a matter of style, of finding what works for you. Among famous authors, I suspect you’ll find both swoopers and bashers. You’re free to experiment with both methods to discover which is better for you.

If you somehow separated swoopers from bashers, and then examined your collection of swoopers carefully, somewhere in that group you’d find—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 4, 2020Permalink

Do You Semicolon?

Among punctuation marks, the semicolon is the nerdy kid who gets picked on and is chosen last for sports teams. The semicolon goes on to college, of course, and finds steady employment, but never moves up or achieves greatness, and yet falls asleep each night dreaming of a life that might have been.

As a refresher, the semicolon links major sentence elements together. It can keep two related independent clauses loosely joined; it also separates items in a list, especially when some listed items contain commas.

Search on your keyboard and you’ll find the semicolon, perhaps sharing a rarely used button with the colon. Yes, it’s that half-comma and half-period thingy—(;). Take a good look, because it may not appear on future keyboards.

That’s right. The semicolon is falling into disuse. With limited keyboard territory available, that’s a kiss of death. Future generations might well ponder about the meaning of that strange mark, unless nearer term translators simply delete it from all texts, substituting commas or periods (or emojis) as they see fit.

Semicolons have hit on hard times, or Times. Ben Macintyre, a columnist in The Times of London wrote, “Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon…Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.”

The semicolon’s chief detractor, however, had to be Kurt Vonnegut, who said semicolons are “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

Sheesh. It’s a semicolon, guys. Do you have to drag sex into everything?

Most people don’t hate the semicolon; they either don’t understand it or don’t see the point of it. Scorn from Vonnegut is one thing; at least he paid the semicolon some attention. But to be ignored and forgotten is far worse.

Despite being the shunned wallflower at parties where the comma and period are the hits, the semicolon boasts of a noble history. In The Tempest, Shakespeare has Prospero use one: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” The Bible is smitten with semicolons, starting in the second phrase of Genesis: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

Eight semicolons lend their gravitas to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution teems with forty-eight of them.

That’s all fine and good, you’re thinking, but tell me what semicolons have done for us lately. And none of that poetry stuff, either. Cite some recent examples of great prose featuring a semicolon.

Sorry, I can’t. It seems that profound prose demands either the finality of a period or the casual linking of a comma. I’ve had anthology editors (bless their persnickety blue pencils) strike some of my semicolons out of existence with their sweeping editorial delete marks. Even so, I use the mark sparingly, varying between two and thirteen times in my last five published stories, for an average of one semicolon in every 54 sentences.

The semicolon enjoys the support of a few writers out there, including Ben Dolnick and Mary Norris, but such praise is rare and scattered. There is no organized ‘Save the Semicolon’ movement, or even a Kickstarter or GoFundMe page.

So, Caring Readers, it’s up to you. Preserving this punctuation mark will depend on how often we all use it. Do your part; my part will be done by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 14, 2018Permalink