Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five, said in his autobiography that his "prettiest contribution to culture" was his rejected master's thesis on the shapes of stories.
Maybe it's because I've always struggled a bit with plotting (or maybe it's because Vonnegut's dry wit is so on point), but "On The Shapes of Stories" seems spot on to me. You can watch it here:
Don't you love that? Since I'm currently knee-deep in writing a trilogy, I thought it would be fun to draw the shapes of the three stories I'm working on:
![Shapes of Stories in The Time Wrecker Trilogy by Ellen Smith [graph] || Inspiration: Kurt Vonnegut's "Shapes of Stories" from the Ellen Smith Writes blog http://www.ellensmithwrites.com/blog/2016/4/27/plotting-inspiration-kurt-vonneguts-shapes-of-st…](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/571641d5a3360ca1d47c7fcc/1552796197976-RI1R4H7E38O7E6H7I42O/Shapes+of+Stories+in+The+Time+Wrecker+Trilogy+by+Ellen+Smith+%5Bgraph%5D+%7C%7C+Inspiration%3A+Kurt+Vonnegut%27s+%22Shapes+of+Stories%22+from+the+Ellen+Smith+Writes+blog+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ellensmithwrites.com%2Fblog%2F2016%2F4%2F27%2Fplotting-inspiration-kurt-vonneguts-shapes-of-stories)
I like that the story shapes for the first and third books are roughly the same. The second book, as I was hoping it would, has a distinctly different shape from the other two. One of the hard parts about planning this series has been ensuring that the overall story arc for the trilogy has a nice flow to it. After this little exercise, I feel like I'm on the right track!
What do you think of Vonnegut's theory? Have you ever drawn out the "shape" of a story you're working on?