Story Shape

A story's shape is the path its movements trace. Each movement leaves the character somewhere other than where they started, so a string of them draws a line.

Two lines. The plot line tracks the character against their objective. The value line tracks them along their value axis. Both run the same engine through the same turns: one choice at each crisis moves each line its own way.

When the lines move together, the story is straight. When they part, the character is gaining what they want at the expense of what they value, or the reverse.

Turns string together in any number and any direction. The named shapes — rags to riches, riches to rags, man in a hole, Icarus, Cinderella, Oedipus — are common paths, not rules. They come from Joe Bunting's The Write Structure, after Kurt Vonnegut and a 2016 University of Vermont study.

Every assembly traces a shape. In a fractal story the shape holds at every zoom level, and zoomed all the way out the whole path is a single turn. In other assemblies it may wander or come home. The lines track the character, not the reader, so when the change happens in the reader, the shape can't show it.