Klaas — “What’s perhaps most surprising, however, is that a…”
Source: Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters — Brian Klaas
Book page: klaas-fluke
From: Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters — Quotes
What’s perhaps most surprising, however, is that a science of storytelling is possible. Our narratives almost always conform to certain patterns, which raises the strange possibility that our mental processes have evolved for specific templates best suited to understanding change—a literal physical embodiment of storybook reality, encoded into our minds. Kurt Vonnegut, one of the greatest authors of all time, demonstrated that most human stories could be graphed, with the vertical axis related to whether good or bad things happen to the main character, and the horizontal axis representing time as the story unfolds. The idea came to him when he noticed significant similarities between the “shape” of the story of Cinderella and the New Testament of the Bible. In another story shape, what he called the “Man in the Hole,” a person gets into trouble, then gets out of it to end the story on a happy note. The Wizard of Oz is this kind of story, as is virtually every sitcom episode ever written. If you’re unlucky, you’ll find yourself in a story arc that Vonnegut calls “From Bad to Worse,” in which the character experiences one misfortune after another. (May you never find yourself in this kind of story, as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.)