Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture in 1995 where he drew story shapes on a blackboard. Two axes: time going left to right, fortune going up and down. Cinderella goes up, crashes at midnight, rockets to a new high. Man in a Hole starts fine, dips, climbs back out.
His point was that every story has a shape and that shape is what people actually feel, more than the content itself.
Business presentations work the same way. The problem is most presentations and essays don't pick a shape on purpose, so the audience get all the information but none of the narrative thread.
There are five arcs that cover most situations.
- Man in a Hole : Turnaround stories: post-mortems, recovery narratives. Things were fine, something broke, here's how we got back.
- Boy Meets Girl : Pivot stories. You have to genuinely honour what was good before naming what's next, otherwise the audience doesn't feel the loss and the new direction doesn't land.
- Cinderella : Transformation stories and fundraises. Steady growth hits a structural ceiling, something specific intervenes, the new trajectory is steeper than anything before it.
- From Bad to Worse : Burning platform. Useful for building urgency, but only if you pair it with a proposed solution in the same conversation, otherwise you've just bummed everyone out.
- Hamlet : When things are genuinely uncertain. Oscillating, no clean resolution, ends with a question and a mechanism for answering it.
Vonnegut was talking about fiction, but the shapes transfer well to anything you make for an audience: decks, memos, emails, proposals. If someone else has to understand it, it could do with a shape.
I kept forgetting to actually use this before jumping into a doc or deck. So I built it as an agent skill : mostly for myself. If you're interested, you can install it from smithery skills and try it out. It'll help you pick the right arc and rough out the beats.
Would love any feedback, truly!