Why you will only tell six good stories in your life

In May 1945, a 22-year-old soldier wrote a letter home to his parents in Indianapolis, Indiana. He described being captured by a German panzer division in what is now called the Battle of the Bulge. The soldier and his unit were loaded onto unheated box cars for a 10-day train ride to a prisoner-of-war camp south of Dresden. After five months watching fellow prisoners die from starvation, abuse, and Allied air raids, the soldier and eight others stole a German truck and drove for eight days until they reached Soviet territory. It was time to go home.

When the soldier got there, he married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie, and they moved west to enroll in the University of Chicago. Likely influenced by the human extremes that he witnessed during the war, he signed up for a joint undergraduate/graduate program in anthropology. After a few years in the program, he wrote a master’s thesis that he called, “The Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales.” The premise was relatively simple.

All stories have shapes, and the great ones look alike.

The idea is that if you create a graph where the horizontal axis represents time and the vertical axis represents the fortune of the main character, you can map every story ever told. And when that student started doing this, he saw that the greatest stories had similar shapes. For example, Cinderella and the New Testament are roughly identical.

The student finished his thesis and excitedly presented it to the faculty at the university—who rejected it on the basis that it was not anthropology at all. With no money and a small child to support, he decided to walk away without a degree. He called his brother who worked at General Electric, got a job writing in the public relations department, and started writing stories of his own on the side.

His name was Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut’s rejected thesis helped him go on to become one of the most famous authors in American history. Because whether it was Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, Player Piano, or any of the other books that he wrote, Vonnegut carefully mapped the shape of every story he ever told.

This is also Hollywood’s greatest secret. It’s no coincidence that the first four Rocky movies all have the same shape: 1) Rocky finds some initial success; 2) tragedy strikes and he faces a seemingly impossible task; 3) Rocky works and trains harder than any human ever could; and 4) Rocky wins the fight. It’s the Cinderella story: rise then fall then rise again.

Sixty-nine years after Vonnegut put forth his theory to an unimpressed faculty committee, researchers from the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide validated his thesis in a study on the shapes of stories. The team used artificial intelligence to digitally map more than 2,000 works of fiction. Their first finding was that the great stories have similar shapes. (Hat tip, Vonnegut.) Their second finding was that there are just six main story arcs:

• Rags to Riches (rise)
• Riches to Rags (fall)
• Man in a Hole (fall then rise)
• Icarus (rise then fall)
• Cinderella (rise then fall then rise)
• Oedipus (fall then rise then fall)

This means that every one of us holds the same key to powerful storytelling as Vonnegut and Hollywood screenwriters. Whether it’s a pitch for a new idea, a presentation to the colleagues, or the launch of a new strategy, you can bring your message to life by deliberately shaping the story you tell. And understanding these six main story arcs is the only place to start.

Back in 1945, Kurt Vonnegut ended his letter to his parents with this prophetic statement: “I’ve too damned much to say, the rest will have to wait.” Luckily for us, he found out just how to say it.

Now we can too.

This is an excerpt from my last book, Work Songs. If you like words like these, you can subscribe to this newsletter.