This week, we watched the video Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories. In this video, Vonnegut talks about the shapes of stories on a sort of line graph diagram. The vertical axis represents the starting point, the lowest being “Ill” and the top being “Good.” This describes how the story starts out, bad or good. The horizontal axis represents the beginning of the story to the end.

“Rumour Has It” by Adele was a really good choice to demonstrate the shape of a story. The song clearly tells a story of a woman being in love with a man and the relationship not working out. So the story starts out very low because the woman, maybe Adele, was unhappy because her ex had found someone new: “She ain’t gonna be able to love you like I did.” She’s really heartbroken by this new relationship her ex is starting. But then, the line starts to go up because maybe they get back together or start seeing each other again and he leaves his new thing: “But rumour has it I’m the one you’re leaving her for.” But then, after a while, it seems like this woman starts to realize Round Two sucks too: “You made a fool out of me.” Next thing you know, she’s done with her ex, for good. And she’s moved on to bigger and better things: “But rumour has it he’s the one I’m leaving you for.”

This was really interesting to try to create the diagram for this song because it forced me to really pay attention to the lyrics of the song and focus on how the song changed in different parts.