{"id":183,"date":"2013-01-19T14:27:11","date_gmt":"2013-01-19T03:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/?p=183"},"modified":"2013-01-19T14:27:11","modified_gmt":"2013-01-19T03:27:11","slug":"kurt-vonnegut-on-the-shapes-of-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/2013\/01\/19\/kurt-vonnegut-on-the-shapes-of-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Kurt Vonnegut on the shapes of stories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over at Brain Pickings <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brainpickings.org\/index.php\/2012\/11\/26\/kurt-vonnegut-on-the-shapes-of-stories\/\">is a nice post<\/a>\u00a0about one of my favourite authors, Kurt Vonnegut. Specifically, it is about Vonnegut&#8217;s reflections on the shapes of stories &#8211; and what it is that we find emotionally satisfying about them. The post includes\u00a0a video extract from a lecture that Vonnegut gave on this topic. Notoriously, Vonnegut&#8217;s anthropology dissertation on\u00a0the shapes of simple stories was rejected, but he\u00a0has a lot of insightful\u00a0things to say in his lecture, for both\u00a0readers and\u00a0aspiring writers. His\u00a0diagram for Cinderella is especially amusing, yet\u00a0salient.<\/p>\n<p>My first Ph.D dissertation (yes, <a href=\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/2012\/12\/31\/hello-world\/\">I&#8217;ve done two of them, long story <\/a>(as it were)) was on a much more specialised but related topic, and one of my fascinations was with the shapes and structures of Vonnegut&#8217;s own narratives.<\/p>\n<p>In all, Vonnegut was a wonderful contributor to modern literature; however, I really don&#8217;t like his advice about semi-colons. I love semi-colons. If you can use semi-colons correctly, you&#8217;re a long way toward being my friend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over at Brain Pickings is a nice post\u00a0about one of my favourite authors, Kurt Vonnegut. Specifically, it is about Vonnegut&#8217;s reflections on the shapes of stories &#8211; and what it is that we find emotionally satisfying about them. The post includes\u00a0a video extract from a lecture that Vonnegut gave on this topic. Notoriously, Vonnegut&#8217;s anthropology [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,24],"tags":[89,88],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aesthetics","category-diversions","tag-kurt-vonnegut","tag-narrative-forms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/hellfireclub\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}