Story shapes

The shape of the contents of your book reflects and honors the shape of your customers’ or clients’ trajectory.

You may know that Kurt Vonnegut came up with story shapes for Cinderella and other well-known stories. He saw them as line graphs.

Just as you would track your business projections from month to month, you could track and project the story line of a given character, where they started, where their days go up or down, positive upswing or negative downswing.

You can apply this to fiction, nonfiction, or a business book.

For narrative nonfiction or fiction, you have the formulaic Save the Cat story structure, which could be drawn as a wavy line, tracking the ups and downs.

The character arc (or the arc of your customer or client) moves along this line.

Kelley and Conner’s Emotional Cycle of Change tracks four regions along the wave: uninformed optimism about a venture, followed by informed pessimism, the valley of despair, and informed optimism. The cycle repeats.

The Slight Edge curve is similar, except the momentum of pushing through despair into informed optimism brings you to a higher state of being or success. So whether you repeat the cycle or not, the success you experience catapults you to a new normal.

Or you could zero in on an arc of that wave, focusing on a smaller part of a bigger story.

The hero’s journey is really exactly the same as the emotional cycle of change, except the frame of the story is shifted over so that the starting point is at a relative low point in one’s life—the ordinary, normal day before an event happens that elevates the day into one a bit more extraordinary filled with new challenges to overcome.

For the nonfiction author or entrepreneur, knowing where your reader or client is at in their lives is important to understand. Typically, they’re struggling with finances or a diet or parenting, whatever you’re helping them with. They are the characters following their own arc, and it’s your job to help them make it an upswing.

If this wavy line idea doesn’t work for you, don’t worry, there are more shapes that you can use, and I’ll discuss that in a future post.

Need help figuring out if your book follows a coherent trajectory? Send me a message.