The Point Is: Making Sense of Birth, Death, and Everything in Between by Lee Eisenberg

Author:Lee Eisenberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Self-Help / Personal Growth / General
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2016-02-01T14:00:00+00:00

12 The James Dean Story

With the end coming into hazy view, we eventually reach the closing stretch of the elbow. Having made it down the long, winding road of midlife, it’s only natural that we ask ourselves whether we’re heading in the right direction. Is the story on track? Is it adding up as well as adding on?

Back when Kurt Vonnegut gave master classes in creative writing, he used chalk and a blackboard to illustrate how a story line can be plotted on a simple graph. He believed you could chart every story this way, from a Greek myth to The Avengers: Age of Ultron. The notion went back to when Vonnegut was a grad student in anthropology. He proposed a topic for his master’s thesis that was quickly rejected “because it was simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut said.

Standing at the blackboard, Vonnegut drew two axes. The horizontal axis, marked “Beginning–End,” denoted the plot of a story. The vertical axis, “G–I,” denoted the degree to which the story’s main character experienced good fortune (prosperity, health, and so on) or ill fortune (poverty, sickness, and so on). He then chose a story—he was partial to Cinderella—and plotted out the heroine’s ups and downs over time. The graph reveals how things get better and better for Cinderella after her fairy godmother drops in to doll her up for the ball. The line on the graph keeps climbing as Cinderella turns heads when she gets to the party, dances with the prince, etc. Then, when the clock strikes twelve, Vonnegut’s graph dramatically illustrates how Cinderella’s good fortune plummets to earth with the vehemence of a major stock market crash. Vonnegut then drew a straight line to indicate how, in his words, Cinderella “poops along” for a while. But eventually, of course, the day comes when the prince knocks on Cinderella’s door, the shoe fits, and Cinderella’s good-fortune line rockets up and off the chart.

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