Learn the seven basic story "shapes" in fiction

Modern authors are always encouraged to learn from the classics, and this blog post is no exception — though it’s not quite what you might expect.

So we’ll start a few decades ago, with Kurt Vonnegut’s proposed master’s thesis.

He proposed that all stories can be boiled down to a handful of patterns, and while the faculty committee rejected this idea, modern technology has proved him right.

Author J.D. Lasica wrote a guest post for Jane Friedman’s blog about the artificial intelligence that enables us to say that Vonnegut was right and shares the seven story shapes that this tool “found” (and how to use them).

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