The art of fiction | 4 November 2011

Here is the late and incomparable Kurt Vonnegut giving a short lecture on stories and relativity. This video was apparently used in American high schools in the ‘80s and with good reason: displaying narrative as a graph is a brilliant way of examining structure and character development. You could go beyond Vonnegut’s rough demonstration and draw a graph with multiple lines, each representing a major character in a book. One is up at a particular moment, driving another down in consequence. Such an approach might make some pupils relate to the densely plotted novels so beloved of the education system.