讲故事与叙事2020bigthink.com编辑精选
冯内古特谈故事的八种“形状”
Kurt Vonnegut on 8 ‘shapes’ of stories
导读
冯内古特用几条简单的手绘曲线，把故事归纳成「陷坑—爬出」「男孩遇见女孩」「从坏到好」等几种形状，直观展示故事的本质是情绪的起伏。这篇值得写作者读，是因为它提供了一个比「英雄之旅」更轻便、更易上手的叙事分析工具，也提醒你别把任何一种模板当成万能公式。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
动笔前先画出主角的情绪曲线：起点在哪、最低点在哪、终点落在哪，再往里填事件。
- 02
把「故事形状」当作诊断工具而非模板：不同文化、不同类型的故事形状各异，硬套会写出千篇一律的东西。
- 03
写悬疑或侦探故事时要意识到自己有两条线——误导读者的一条和真相的一条，结尾要让读者用同一批事实得出完全不同的解读。
- 04
警惕「陷坑—爬出—胜利」这种好莱坞式默认结构，问自己：这个故事选这个形状，是因为它合适，还是因为惯性？
HN 评论精选
故事形状作为教学工具的优点是直观、可迁移，且能兼容跨文化的叙事差异。
冯内古特是少有的既能娱乐又能教学的学者（这种本事在学术界之外其实也不多见）。故事形状是理解叙事的一个极好的教学工具，是对「英雄之旅」的有益补充：它更直观、更容易套用到别的故事结构上，甚至能让你看到不同文化的不同处理方式。
Hokusai查看英文原文
Kurt Vonnegut is one of that rare academics to be able to entertain and teach at the same time. (Not that this attribute is any more common outside academia) The shape of stories is a very good pedagogical tool to understand narrative, a nice complement to the Hero's Journey. It makes it more intuitive and easier to apply to other story structures, and even to see different approaches from different cultures. If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.
主流商业叙事高度依赖同一两种形状，写作者要警惕滑向套路。
在我看来，几乎每一部好莱坞电影都是「陷坑的人」或「男孩遇见女孩」：某人过着正常生活，发生了一件事（未必是坏事，也可能只是个新挑战），主角最终获胜。也许我只是把「大团圆结局」这个陈词滥调简化成了一个模板。
lazyant查看英文原文
Seems to me almost every Hollywood movie is a "man in the hole" / "boy meets girl", as in somebody leads a normal life, something happens (could be something not bad, like a new challenge) and the main character(s) come out victorious. Maybe I'm simplifying and applying a template to the "happy ending" cliche.
悬疑/侦探类故事是双线结构，结尾要重新照亮前文已给出的事实，而非新增信息。
我不确定典型的侦探或悬疑故事能轻易套进这个框架，因为它有两条并行的故事线：作者一路牵着你的那条误导性线索，以及结尾揭晓的「真实」故事。这类故事的标志性特征是：前者呈现的「事实」在后者中依然存在，只是被以完全不同的方式看待。
mannykannot查看英文原文
I am not sure that the archetypical detective or mystery story would fit easily into this framework, as there are two concurrent stories: the misleading one that the author is stringing you along with, and the 'real' story as revealed in the denouement. The signature element of this style is that the 'facts' presented as part of the former are still there, but viewed differently, in the latter.
情绪弧线可以被量化可视化，大规模数据印证了「故事形状」确实存在。
这些差不多正是我开发 prosecraft.io 时用的方法：你可以看到一万六千多本书的情感弧线，也就是故事的形状。我在约十五亿词的语料上训练词向量模型，用聚类算法给词打 1 到 10 的情感分（1 最负面，10 最正面），再把每本书切成 50 等份，汇总每份的正负分数。点开图表任意一段，就能看到贡献该段情感的词云；看这些图，真能看见主角挣扎着克服障碍时故事的起伏。这个思路我是从佛蒙特大学「计算故事实验室」的 Hedonometer 项目学来的，他们用同样的技术分析推特数据流，测量世界整体的情绪弧线。
benjismith查看英文原文
YES! These are pretty much exactly the methods I used when I developed my project http://prosecraft.io You can see the emotional story arc -- the shapes of the stories -- for more than 16,000 books. I train a Word2Vec model on the vocabulary of all those books (almost 1.5 billion words) and then I use a clustering algorithm to score all those words on a sentiment scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 is the most negative and 10 is the most positive). Then I break the books into 50 equal-sized chunks and aggregate the positive and negative scores for each chunk. You can click on any of the chart segments to see a word cloud of all the words that contributed to the positive and negative sentiment of that chunk. You can really see the ups and downs of the stories, as the protagonists struggle to overcome their obstacles, when you look at those charts! Here are a few of my favorite example books to show people: The Hobbit http://prosecraft.io/library/j-r-r-tolkien/the-hobbit/ Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows http://prosecraft.io/library/j-k-rowling/harry-potter-and-the-deathly-hallows/ Animal Farm http://prosecraft.io/library/george-orwell/animal-farm/ I first encountered this method not through Vonnegut but through the "Hedonometer" project, at the University of Vermont Computational Story Lab. They use this technique on the twitter firehose, to measure the overall emotional arc of the world, as expressed in social media. https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/ There's an excellent episode of the podcast Lexicon Valley where they discuss the hedonometer project, with the researchers at UVM who developed it... http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2015/06/lexicon_valley_the_pollyanna_hypothesis_all_languages_have_a_positivity.html
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