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Researchers analysed 1700 novels to reveal six story types
- andrewclunn 8y agoUp Down Up down Down up Up down up Down up down Gee thanks for that brilliant insight.
- somberi 8y agoHemmingway, when challenged that simple words and short sentences do not work well, wrote: Infant's shoes for sale. Never worn. Apparently Ray Bradbury, when asked what science fiction is, supposed to have written: Last man in the world heard a knock on his door.
- hiisukun 8y agoThis reminds me strongly of a blog post [1] I read recently (probably on HN!) that listed an abstract form for 'all' the RPG plots. The list is unfortunately much than the six given in the bbc article, but the feeling I got from reading it is the same. [1] http://rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-big-list-of-rpg-plots.html http://rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-big-list-of-r...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sdrothrock 8y ago> Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Professor Matthew Jockers at Washington State University, and later researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, analysed data from thousands of novels to reveal six basic story types It seems a bit naive to say "every story in the world" when they analyzed only "thousands of novels" -- this doesn't even mention what languages they analyzed. I could imagine many Greek-influenced cultures (e.g. "the West") having similar archetypes by virtue of a common ancestor. Language analysis tools for CJK aren't, as far as I know, as advanced, so I can imagine a lot of stories from those languages being left out as well. The reason I bring this up is that I'm reading a book called "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes," [1] which is about a remote tribe of people in the Amazon jungle called the Pirahã. [2] One of the most stunning points in the book is that their culture is such that all stories told by native Pirahã are based on first-person experience. When a Pirahã dies, their stories are not passed on or retold. Due to this, there's also no need to record past stories, orally or otherwise. This kind of study would obviously exclude stories from that kind of culture and seems a bit narrow-minded: "everything I looked at says A, so EVERYTHING must be A." [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307386120 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307386120 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3
- robotresearcher 8y agoWhy would it exclude Pirahã stories? "I got up this morning and everything was fine. Mid-morning I fell out of a tree and had a hell of a time getting home. But I made it and was so happy to see my family again." The rise/fall model is rather trivial, but your point doesn't stick.
- sdrothrock 8y ago> Why would it exclude Pirahã stories? Because they analyzed "thousands of novels." There are no Pirahã novels. The point I was trying to make is that the sample set of 1700 novels, most likely from a Western tradition, is laughably small to claim it applies to "every story in the world."
- johnchristopher 8y agoClassic HN nitpicking in defense of the pretty snowflake.
- smithmayowa 8y agoWhat about fall to fall tales and rise to rise tales that abound plenty-full in several cultures like mine.
- acbart 8y agoTrivially reducible to the concatenation of a Rise-to-rag and a Rags-to-rise tales! Clearly nothing new there.
- gaius 8y agoThanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done Thanks text mining techniques! Here's an article saying the same thing almost word-for-word from 2004 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3632074/Everything-ever-written-boiled-down-to-seven-plots.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3632074/Everything...
- stephengillie 8y agoEverything new is old already.
- shakethemonkey 8y agoAnd then there's TV Tropes[1] which uses a finer measure [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Plots https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Plots
- hprotagonist 8y agoI wonder if I can construct a Cantor-like diagonal proof that creates a definitively non-countable plot.
- tlb 8y agoHere, the only tokens are rise and fall and they must alternate. So you can enumerate plots by picking a starting token and a number of alternations. Thus there are Aleph_0 plots. If you tracked multiple hero/protagonists then their interleavings could be uncountable.
- throwaway287391 8y agoWouldn't multiple protagonists still be countable by the same proof that the rational numbers are countable?
- manwe150 8y agoIs it required that “rise” and “fall” be boolean/digital operations? I think it would be more reasonable to characterize them as analog/continuous. That could then lead to infinite variations in rates, even just with a single character. And that’s before considering whether the characters and reader are correct in determining their current trajectory—much as in real life.
- vichu 8y agoA great book on this subject is Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. His theory of the archetypal hero and the theory of the monomyth is a great influence on anlyses like this one (and also on some artistic works - including a small film series known as Star Wars). It's fantastic to see these natural language processing techniques applied to this topic.
- sambeau 8y agoI blame Joseph Campbell for ruining modern cinema with it's simplistic boring plots (like Star Wars's) where yet another hero battles some evil tyrant to save the world, universe or forest. There are so many more interesting, surprising stories to be told that leave the viewer with unresolved things to think about and captivating cul-de-sacs along the way. The 1970s films were full of odd, interesting plots and films where it was unclear who the protagonist was (let alone a hero). Then Lucas discovered Campbell and made two pretty-good, unbelievably successful kids' films and modern cinema was born. Now every film (especially kids' films) are a take on a James Bond plot whether they are about loveable zoo Creatures and cheeky penguins, toys in a nursery-school or talking cars: a super-villain, a secret base, a mysterious super-weapon… yawn Grown-up films are no better: reduced to a sorry stream of infantilised garbage about super-heros who each in turn is given super-powers only to see them quickly taken away to provide some tension before a giant battle in which cities (and budgets) are destroyed for no good reason (accept perhaps to deliver a few half-decent one-liners) before a last-minute triumphant victory in a working steel-mill (if budget allows) or some disused warehouse if not. sigh
- nprateem 8y agoAgreed. Hollywood wanted a formula and found one in Campbell. After reading that book or others about the "hero's journey" most mainstream films are quite bland. Having said that, there are only 7 notes in the major scale and look what that's done for us...
- CuriouslyC 8y agoThe evolution of music in the 21st century is all about creative deviation from music theory, so I'd say your analogy isn't saying what you intended it to.
- sambeau 8y agoMy kids & I watched the Coen Brothers, "Burn After Reading" last night. I'd love to hear how anyone could argue that it fits any one of these.
- qbrass 8y agoIt's multiple stories driven by the same set of events. Osborne and Harry both have riches to rags stories of varying degrees. Things get progressively worse for the both of them, but Osborne wasn't doing so great to start with. Kate and Linda have Cinderella stories of varying degrees. They both start off thinking they're getting what they want, things get worse for most of the story, and both end up with basically what they started out trying to get in the end.
- vntok 8y agoRiches to rags for Cox (from CIA analyst to vegetable in hospital). Icarus for Chad (from aspiring millionaire to dead in mere days). Cinderella for Linda (from aspiring millionaire to everything going wrong, losing Chad, etc. to having her surgery paid in full by the CIA)
- johnchristopher 8y agoI am of the opinion that the plot doesn't matter as much as the context into which the story is being told: who are you telling the story to and why ? Which view of the world are you conveying at that moment ? Why tell that particular story now and to which audience ? Moreover, the receiver's personal ties to the story and its elements (characters, settings and then the meta:translation, origin, etc.) before, during and after getting story matters as much, if not more.
- busterarm 8y agoThis feels pretty reductive. They chose one variable to measure stories on, fortune, and then of course all of these stories follow a short list of possible patterns. This counts as research?
- ummonk 8y agoWhat they should research next: "every story falls into one of these basic length categories!"
- projectramo 8y agoShort, medium and long. Researchers could not find other lengths although they hypothesized that if someone wanted they could create a “mega” category. “It’s possible,” they concluded.
- mannykannot 8y agoParticularly in some genres: short, long and trilogy.
- kbutler 8y agoepic fantasy is just getting started at the third volume.
- lozenge 8y agoFunnily, book and story lengths actually do bunch up for commercial reasons. I read of one author whose kids book was semi accepted, but they needed another 80 pages to hit the next price point. (Basically, the unusually thin book would not "communicate value" on the shelf). Extending the story ruined the flow, so he decided to self publish online. The same is true for film - opportunities to tell a 10 minute or 70 minute story are pretty rare, and I think techniques of film have just developed around that limitation. A 70 minute film might just leave viewers feeling confused.
- ur-whale 8y agoI'm not sure I'm buying the theory laid out in this article, for at least two reasons. First, I'm not even sure every good story can be shoehorned in the framework. For example, how does the archetypal "vengeance story" fit in that framework? In that type of story, many a time, the seeker of vengeance, once he's reached his goal after much struggling, finds he's destroyed himself in so doing. Trying to apply the framework leads to the main character essentially never getting out of the hole ... you could argue that reaching the vengeance goal is a super short "high" of the story, but I find the argument specious. Second, even if we assume that every story can somehow be shoehorned into a simple curve of highs and lows ... what does that actually teach you about the story? More importantly, what kind of creative help does that buy you? I'm pretty sure I coud "reverse-engineer" any highs-an-lows type curve into a story rather easily ... will that make the story any kind of interesting? I doubt it.
- apo 8y agoIn the early-90's I saw Vonnegut give a presentation in which he talked about his story graph idea. However, the video linked to in the article appears to end before the most interesting part. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-84vuR1f90 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-84vuR1f90 Hamlet. It's never clear whether what's happening belongs more toward the good or bad side of the vertical axis. The curve you get is a flat horizontal line. That's art. Never clearly good or bad but profound ambiguity. Also, for those interested in the systematic (graphical) formulation of stories, check out StoryGrid: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25455700-the-story-grid https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25455700-the-story-grid
- stepvhen 8y agoPretty sure most folk in Hamlet get a bad deal in the end, and Hamlet's brooding and whining doesnt outweigh that. Ophelia literally goes mad and is driven to arguable suicide. Everyone that mattered dies, and if that is outweighed by Fortinbras and his good fortune in the end. Hamlet is Icarus if anything, since it only goes well for him for a moment while everybody else is on a downward spiral.
- 8bitsrule 8y agoThe curve you get is a flat horizontal line. That's art. Maybe. It's also death.
- mtVessel 8y agoAristotle came to the same conclusions somewhat earlier, using only natural intelligence and manual learning techniques.
- mrob 8y agoCounterexample: A poor man finds a magic lamp. He summons the genie, and wishes for great fortune. (Rags to riches.) He makes another wish, and it horribly backfires. (Icarus.) No longer trusting genies, he wishes he'd never found the lamp. The genie rewinds time. A poor man finds a magic lamp.... (Infinite loop plot not included in the classification.) EDIT: Downvoter, how would you classify this story?
- keybuk 8y agoDepends which season of Star Trek it's from. Early in the run it'll come across as kinda corny, but mid-way through the run it'll be a strong episode and one fans will cite as a favorite forever.
- MrTonyD 8y agoIt took me a while to figure out that on HN you get downvoted if you aren't agreed with or your opinion is disliked - quite often nothing to do with any actual intellectual argument. I've learned to ignore all the downvotes that I get - they are meaningless, and usually associated with what I consider to be my more insightful posts. (Since more insight implies that more other people haven't made the same observation - thus more downvotes.)
- __s 8y agoThat's alright, next you need to make the sequence normal so that it's never repeating Another counter example: https://serprex.github.io/w/Ad%20nauseum%20ad%20nauseum https://serprex.github.io/w/Ad%20nauseum%20ad%20nauseum This is a story I started writing last year, it doesn't have rises & falls, just someone reminiscing on the way to the corner store for a bag of chips If my writing doesn't count since it's just some random page on the internet, there's Bob Dylan's Tarantula, & he's won a Nobel for literature. You'll be forced to say "Every story has one these six basic plots, where a story must have a plot, & a plot must be composed of rises & falls" since anything that would go against that gets categorized as a "sub story" or "not part of the story"
- kbutler 8y ago"goto start" doesn't make it a new story, it's just a repeat, or re-telling of the story (possibly with variations, a la groundhog day) I also disagree with the contention that all "stories" have to fit the patterns, unless you narrow the definition of story to fit the patterns.
- SubiculumCode 8y agoIf you reduce to 1 axis all plots then yes all changes are on that axis.
- blueboo 8y agolol! tldr: Every story has change. * Positive * Negative * Positive, then negative! * Negative, then positive! * Positive, then negative...then positive! * Really negative...then positive! if that's what you learn after studying 1700 novels, i'd give up on fiction entirely
- SubiculumCode 8y agoEven if we were to allow that the story can be described on one dimension over time: Real stories do not have one arc. A lone melody works on one dimension also: Absolute rises and falls.. This can be pleasing but is limited in it expressiveness. Add another note however, and you get another kind of rise and fall: Relative. One note is falling, but the other note is falling faster. One note rises while the other note falls, but then later falls when the other rises.. Now add a third note, and you start to get to hint and deceive where each note will go, fulfilling and violating expectations. Now that sounds like a real story.
- falien 8y agoThe blog post this was based on (http://www.matthewjockers.net/2014/06/05/a-novel-method-for-detecting-plot/ http://www.matthewjockers.net/2014/06/05/a-novel-method-for-...) which is from 2014 was widely panned when it was first publicized, and some of the many problems with the methodology pointed out by scholars with more experience and competence with the statistical methods involved. That's how scholarship is supposed to work. However, it will never stop media from seizing on a great click-baity headline.
- simtam 8y agoEvery time I see such a list on the internet, I ask myself "So, now, which of those basic plots is 'Master and Margarita'?", which leads to a conclusion that these lists bear a negligible amount of cognitive value.
- stewbrew 8y agoFollowing this typology: Man in the hole? The "Master and Margarita" isn't that complex with respect to its basic plot. The plot doesn't tell you much about the story though.
- vntok 8y ago"Master and Margarita" seem to follow the BBC post's Oedipus storyline: Fall (rejection of the Master's novel, his desperation, separation from Margarita and internment into a psychiatric hospital), Rise (Margarita's offer from Satan brings her power over the elements, the Master finally gets out of prison and the couple gets back together) & Fall again when they are poisoned and die in disgrace both from Satan and God.
- stewbrew 8y agoOr maybe, every story has one of this one basic plot: (1) setup/intro/beginning, (2) stuff happens, (3) things somehow come to an end (for now).
- sacado2 8y agoNot sure you even need the first part. A character has a problem and tries to solve it, until he either succeeds or definitely fails. Lots of stories start with a conflict at the very first line, without any kind of setup (especially thrillers).
- jVinc 8y agoI'd love to see someone drawing out the graph for A song of fire and Ice. Not only do you have several simultansus character arcs to draw out, but through the story arch they are also discontinuous and mix between being interwoven and separate in quite interesting fashions.
- Ptyx 8y agoWhat about Waiting for Godot? The play in which nothing happens, two times.
- weeksie 8y agoPlot structures are tools. All else being equal it's a good idea to pick a plot that's as simple as possible and hang the interesting stuff off that. The classic mistake of beginning writers is to go for complexity in plot and then spend their entire time serving that plot to the detriment of their characters. That said, of course not every story fits into some basic set of plot outlines without some serious mental acrobatics. Plot isn't even necessary, what's necessary is getting inside people's heads. The classic plots (however they're formulated) are all good ways to do that but you can also do that with meandering unstructured prose, if you're good enough, though few people are and the further you get from universal tricks the more likely you are to run into serious disagreements over who writes really good nonconformist stories. Maybe a good example is dialog. The beginner's mistake is to write as if people are listening and responding to what the other has said. e.g. "Hey Joe, what's up?" "Just whippin' up some breakfast." versus "Hey Joe, what's up?" "Jesus, you look like shit. Want some breakfast?" In the second example the reader fills in the blanks mentally. It creates engagement. Do that in the small throughout your book and few people will complain that you lack a plot. Easier said than done. Plots are good. Use them. But they're not the whole, uh, story.
- jacobkg 8y agoCan you give reference(s) for that beginner’s mistake? I’ve never heard it before and it’s definitely something I do. Would love to learn more about this!
- whydoineedthis 8y agoWasn't this already well known from Kurt Vonnegut lectures? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ
- thinkingemote 8y agoAs indeed the first and second paragraph states
- keiferski 8y agoKafka doesn’t seem to fit these plots. Most of his work is about conveying a mood or feeling.
- crazygringo 8y agoThis abuses the word "plot". These aren't plots, they're highest-level structures. They're also merely all six alternations of up/down across two and three combinations. "From bad to good fortune" or "From good to bad to good" isn't a plot. "A young man leaves his town in search of adventure, his talent is quickly recognized by the military and he leads a platoon in battle which wins the war and he finds the meaning in his life he'd been missing" is a plot, albeit a very basic one.
- rayalez 8y agoThere are dozens of writing mentors/gurus, and every one of them has discovered the story structure, or the 3/7/10/50 basic plots. All of them are different. From vague and meaningless "beginning-middle-end but not always in the same order" to Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet or Dan Harmon's story circle(Campbell's hero's journey). They all are kinda true, for the same reason you can find the proof of UFO in the Bible, or determine that there are "two kinds of people", or discover 4 personality types. Anything can be shoehorned into any kind of pattern if your definition is vague enough and you're willing to stretch the meaning of things hard enough. Different writers are familiar with different structures and use ones they prefer, bending and modifying them as they wish. Some writers break the rules on purpose. Some writers get high out of their minds and write stream of consciousness novels in a weekend. Any of that can result in a great/famous/successful story. Finding the pattern that fits all of that is only possible if it's so vague that it can fit literally anything, at which point it becomes meaningless. Plots and story structures can be picked up and used when it's convenient, it's easier to write when you have a paint-by-numbers structure to hang your story upon, but there isn't the one story structure or the six story types, that's silly.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- CuriouslyC 8y agoYou misunderstood the research in the article. They aren't saying that there are only 6 plots, rather that there are 6 basic progressions of valence (i.e. mood of the story) that almost all stories are minor variations of. There are of course variations that are outliers, and the way in which these valence transitions occur differs from story to story, but the emotional "ride" these progressions create should be very similar.
- affinity100 8y agoVery nice take.
- madcaptenor 8y agoSo if you figure that stories are composed of rises and falls, and they have to alternate, don’t you get this result automatically?
- nl 8y agoThis is the paper if anyone is interested: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07772 https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07772 I've done some work with one of the authors (Lewis, who is based at Adelaide Uni). They do some interesting work generally.
- Theodores 8y agoI think people's motivations for writing fiction - novels - could be reduced to six. Some of these motivations are simple to understand - 'get rich', 'get recognised', 'sheer pleasure', 'because your failed author parents want you to repeat their folly' and so on. I have seen 'there are only n types of plot' stories before, I would much rather have motivations for writing novels being the categorisation as then I would be able to better identify what I did want to read, i.e. the 'banned books'. There is a big difference between what some Eton educated aristocrat dictates to their secretary so they can be lauded in society as an 'author' to what someone in jail with no education writes to get themselves their freedom. This applies to words beyond novels too. For example the 'left wing' writings of Tony Benn (UK anti-war movement, aristocrat, dictated to secretaries) matter very little to me compared to what Malcolm X had to say. New stories that don't necessarily fit into pigeonholes can come from real life where that period of history is a bit of a lie and the truth can't be told under any circumstances. During these times the only truth can be found in novels that transpose the names, times and places for something that the audience won't self-censor. So we end up with 'Oceania' or 'Animal Farm' with it not being clear what regime is being critiqued exactly. Such works of fiction are written because something needs to be said, or at least the author thinks so. It is not like the author has decided 'I want to become a writer' and googled a plot from the internet to rip off. In this way literature is written, not just novels to make money with.
- amp108 8y agoIgnore everything that makes stories different from each other, only look at the beginning and the end states, and hey-presto, you can reduce every story to one of six types.