Category Archives for Entrepreneurship
The Six Shapes of All Stories – with Entrepreneurial Tales
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.
Creatives – Stop Fighting With Your Clients About Your Copyright Rights
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.
Making the Leap — 4 Things I’m Learning About Full-Time Freelance Life
One of my favorite television shows of all time is The Office.
If you’ve never seen it, it has all the fixings of the stock corporate workplace: drab decor, underwhelmed employees, bland work, and a cringey-yet-lovable manchild as a boss.
It was a show that spoke to those in cubicleland.
Part of what made people fall in love with The Office was not just its ability to portray touching moments in a mundane setting, but also its documentary-like film style that allowed characters to speak directly to the audience about their lives in this all-too-familiar setting.
The Self-Loathing of Authorpreneurship
“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy….”
So writes George Orwell in the conclusion of his essay “Why I Write”, which — as the noted historical novelist Thomas Mallon has recently observed — displays Orwell’s “clear awareness that self-loathing and self-love are locked in a tight, procreative embrace.”
According to Orwell, the generative interaction between self-regard and shame are first on the list of reasons writers decide to write.
“Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc.”
As we’ll see, it’s often their emotional reactions to childhood snubbing — or similar experiences — that drive writers to take action, become authorpreneurs, and begin the hard work of building their brand in a competitive modern marketplace.