3 ms·

This 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 pa

This 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 ago
What they should research next: "every story falls into one of these basic length categories!"
- projectramo 8y ago
  Short, 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 ago
    Particularly in some genres: short, long and trilogy.
    - kbutler 8y ago
      epic fantasy is just getting started at the third volume.
  - lozenge 8y ago
    Funnily, 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.
    - yesenadam 8y ago
      It's interesting how in filmed stories there are the 2 main types - movie and tv series, where the shorter movie seems the more serious/central/important/prestigious etc form, the opposite of the situation with short story/novella vs novel. That's just from the historical accident of people seeing movies in cinemas, and series on TV, I guess. 70min movies can work fine - the 68 min Detour (1945), one of the first noirs, doesn't seem too short at all. Rick and Morty at 22 or so minutes does more than most 1 hour tv shows - an hour at that pace might be too much. Also, it seems that in the first decades or 50 years of cinema, plenty of 10 and 70 minute stories were shown, but recently you get the 'main feature' and nothing else.
yellowapple 8y ago
I'm curious if they count television as storytelling here. If so, then the whole premise is demonstrably false; your standard soap opera will go beyond the stated one or two fortune-inflections in a single episode, let alone a season, let alone a series run.
- thinkingemote 8y ago
  There are no television scripts in the article.
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    Indeed, hence the curiosity. The article (both title and content, and the original title of the HN post before it got changed for some reason) claims that every story follows one of the proposed six plots, and the lack of any discussion of non-novels betrays a narrow definition of "story" in order to justify that claim. Even revising the claim to "all novels follow these plots" is surely easy to disprove given the relatively small sample size compared to the sheer abundance of novels written, but at least it wouldn't try to assert specific literary structures on non-literary forms of storytelling (and even some (quasi)literary ones; I've encountered a lot of fanfics with Mary Sue characters who experience no change in fortune at all!).
    - CuriouslyC 8y ago
      Any television series with a plot arc is going to have multiple stories occurring simultaneously, starting and ending asynchronously. Each of those stories will likely follow a valence arc like the ones described in the article if analyzed independently.
thinkingemote 8y ago
They don't choose fortune, they do sentiment analysis on the words in the text. That this might be mapped or interpreted as being the same as fortune is an interpretation. For example positive words don't necessarily mean fortune in the plot, but often a plot showing fortune will have positive words. This is an important distinction when looking at whether it's good or bad research.
- ggggtez 8y ago
  If they found that despite the fact that a story can start happy and get sad, no story had ever done so, and it actually seemed to be impossible, well that would be quite an amazing discovery. However they only discovered that a variable can go up, down, or stay the same. Not exactly rocket science.

This 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 ago

What they should research next: "every story falls into one of these basic length categories!"

projectramo 8y ago
Short, 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 ago
  Particularly in some genres: short, long and trilogy.
  - kbutler 8y ago
    epic fantasy is just getting started at the third volume.
- lozenge 8y ago
  Funnily, 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.
  - yesenadam 8y ago
    It's interesting how in filmed stories there are the 2 main types - movie and tv series, where the shorter movie seems the more serious/central/important/prestigious etc form, the opposite of the situation with short story/novella vs novel. That's just from the historical accident of people seeing movies in cinemas, and series on TV, I guess. 70min movies can work fine - the 68 min Detour (1945), one of the first noirs, doesn't seem too short at all. Rick and Morty at 22 or so minutes does more than most 1 hour tv shows - an hour at that pace might be too much. Also, it seems that in the first decades or 50 years of cinema, plenty of 10 and 70 minute stories were shown, but recently you get the 'main feature' and nothing else.

yellowapple 8y ago

I'm curious if they count television as storytelling here. If so, then the whole premise is demonstrably false; your standard soap opera will go beyond the stated one or two fortune-inflections in a single episode, let alone a season, let alone a series run.

thinkingemote 8y ago
There are no television scripts in the article.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  Indeed, hence the curiosity. The article (both title and content, and the original title of the HN post before it got changed for some reason) claims that every story follows one of the proposed six plots, and the lack of any discussion of non-novels betrays a narrow definition of "story" in order to justify that claim. Even revising the claim to "all novels follow these plots" is surely easy to disprove given the relatively small sample size compared to the sheer abundance of novels written, but at least it wouldn't try to assert specific literary structures on non-literary forms of storytelling (and even some (quasi)literary ones; I've encountered a lot of fanfics with Mary Sue characters who experience no change in fortune at all!).
  - CuriouslyC 8y ago
    Any television series with a plot arc is going to have multiple stories occurring simultaneously, starting and ending asynchronously. Each of those stories will likely follow a valence arc like the ones described in the article if analyzed independently.

thinkingemote 8y ago

They don't choose fortune, they do sentiment analysis on the words in the text. That this might be mapped or interpreted as being the same as fortune is an interpretation. For example positive words don't necessarily mean fortune in the plot, but often a plot showing fortune will have positive words. This is an important distinction when looking at whether it's good or bad research.

ggggtez 8y ago
If they found that despite the fact that a story can start happy and get sad, no story had ever done so, and it actually seemed to be impossible, well that would be quite an amazing discovery. However they only discovered that a variable can go up, down, or stay the same. Not exactly rocket science.