'The Shape of Stories' according to Kurt Vonnegut, was his master’s thesis in anthropology at the University of Chicago. In his 1981 autobiography 'Palm Sunday' he says it was rejected because it was just too simple and simply too much fun to be taken seriously.
In his four minute lecture, Vonnegut draws a graph on which any story can be plotted. The vertical axis represents the good and ill fortune the characters experience over the horizontal axis which represents the time from the beginning to the end of a story.