If there’s one thing we here at CYC know well, it’s the agony of writer’s block.
When you write for a living, your words are your moneymaker, but making them come out and play is not always easy, or possible. Sometimes, you’ll sit down at your keyboard, poised to make magic happen, and suddenly find that you’re down the rabbit hole of YouTube’s finest dog trick compilations.
What happened there?
Your creative juices just weren’t flowing, so you abandoned the empty document for the internet playground, in the false hope that distracting yourself would ‘spark something.’
It’s confirmed. Science has found six core shapes underlying all stories.
At the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Laboratory (CSL), Peter Dodds, Chris Danforth, and their team made the discovery.
The concept of a common story shape is not a new one. Aristotle, in his seminal work Poetics, first discussed the shape of stories in 335 BCE. He wrote about the importance of unity in the beginning, middle, and end of a story, and broke popular examples like Homer’s Odyssey down to their rudimentary parts, revealing a shape found in most Epics and Tragedies.
In 1985, Kurt Vonnegut wrote his master’s thesis on the subject, finding eight shapes that can be easily plotted and replicated. He gives a lecture on the graphs here and there is a friendly infographic here.
These scholars were challenged on their numbers and the simplicity of their theories. The author Georges Polti suggested there are 36 story shapes, and Vonnegut’s thesis was rejected by the University of Chicago.
CSL has now provided the proof. There are six basic shapes to all stories.
When you create anything, be it a novel, a play, a piece of art, a record, or a film, making sure that your creation is legally protected is extremely important. Copyrighting your work is the most basic form of protection, and that protection exists from the moment you create something fixed and tangible.
While you do not have to register your work with your country’s copyright office to have it protected under the copyright law, doing so gives you extra legal power if someone were to steal your content.
Sounds pretty straightforward, right? You have ownership of the content you create, and if anyone steals it, they are breaking the law.
How well do you know your audience?
You probably know if they’re customers, clients, stakeholders, or supporters. You may know if they’re fans, interested but not engaged, or occasional visitors. But even if you have data on your audience, how well do you actually know them?
Do you know what they need? What they desire? What moves them to action?
When you’re creating content you hope they consume, are you creating that content with them in mind, or are you only pushing something you want at them?