Kurt Vonnegut thought every story has a shape that can be graphed — each has a beginning and an end (plotted on the x-axis) and every character goes through “good fortune” and “ill fortune” (plotted on the y-axis). I put a bunch of them together for this chart in Show Your Work!:
I think our days have shapes, too — each has a beginning and an end, and we go through good and ill fortune as it progresses.
I usually give my days (goofy) titles in my logbook, like this:
But sometimes, riffing off of Vonnegut, I’ll skip the title and just draw a shape, like I did on Father’s Day this year:
Of course, if you extend this thought, and string the days together, it follows that weeks, months, and years, and even lives must have shapes, too.
Here’s a couple of pages from the original handwritten manuscript for Show Your Work! that I could never quite fit into the “Chain-Smoking” section:
It suddenly occurs to me that maybe I’m remembering all of this because I’ve been watching Masters of Sex, and they’re always looking at the EKG (or was that EEG?) readouts:
Ha! Anyways, I still like this heartbeat/EKG metaphor. Maybe I’ll do something else with it someday…
