“Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard”

My students in the Writing for Screen & Stage program at the University of North Carolina are great. Smart, interested, motivated, and bubbling with talent. And sometimes, they go above and beyond. Like this email from rising senior Sam Morgan:

Hey Scott,

I knew how much you liked Kurt Vonnegut and drawing charts about writing so I figured you needed to see this post.

I do love drawing charts about writing. However I have such horrible handwriting and I get so excited when analyzing stories, when I get done scribbling on the chalkboard, it often resembles your lower intestine. Yes, I love charts. And Vonnegut. So Sam, thanks. I really did enjoy this article by Vonnegut:

I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here — great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively].

This is the B-E axis. B for beginning, E for entropy. Okay. Not every story has that very simple, very pretty shape that even a computer can understand [draws horizontal line extending from middle of G-I axis].

Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick, so start your story up here [indicates top of the G-I axis]. You will see this story over and over again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted. The story is “Man in Hole,” but the story needn’t be about a man or a hole. It’s: somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again [draws line A]. It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers.

You get the gist. Vonnegut offers three other charts in the article.

Boy Meets Girl:

Cinderella:

Franz Kafka:

All this is great fun and you should most definitely read the rest of the article because it’s illustrative that stories have a structure.

Because screenwriters are inundated with dozens of differing screenplay paradigms, we can get bogged down in details, even stifling our creativity to fit narrative events into somebody’s idea of what page this plot point or that should happen. But you’ll notice one consistent element to all of Vonnegut’s drawings: Each has a Beginning, Middle, and End. There are endless variations of what can happen in a story, as Vonnegut’s illustrations suggest, but invariably all stories have three big movements:

Act One — Act Two — Act Three

Thesis — Antithesis — Synthesis

Beginning — Middle — End

Whatever you choose to call them, those three movements provide us with a framework within which we have the freedom to write whatever we want. And very few writers did that as well as Vonnegut. Here is an excerpt from his first novel “Player Piano” (1952):

Paul had learned to listen with outward calm when Finnerty spoke of his morbid moments. When he was with Finnerty, he liked to pretend that he shared the man’s fantastic and alternately brilliant or black inner thoughts — almost as though he were discontent with his own relative tranquility. Finnerty had spoken dispassionately of suicide often; but, seemingly, he did it because he got pleasure from savoring the idea. If he’d felt driven to kill himself, he would have been dead long ago.
“You think I’m insane?” said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him.
“You’re still in touch. I guess that’s the test.”
“Barely — barely.”
“A psychiatrist could help. There’s a good man in Albany.”
Finnerty shook his head. “He’d pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” He nodded, “Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.”

That’s Vonnegut’s creative perspective: Out on the edge where he chose to stay his entire writing career.

UDPATE: In comments, judy notes this:

That’s great. For a similar yet different story and set of Vonnegut diagrams on drama and why we seek it, you can visit Derek Sivers’ blog at http://sivers.org/drama.

Derek is founder of CD Baby, an online marketing site used by a lot of my indie artist friends.

Definitely check out the link. Here’s the main takeaway:

Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing to go down in history about. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it’ll be told for a thousand years.

“But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.”

That’s why people invent fights. That’s why we’re drawn to sports. That’s why we act like everything that happens to us is such a big deal.

We’re trying to make our life into a fairy tale.

And while you’re there, bookmark Derek’s site. He’s an inspiration re creativity and living.

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