I would argue every story has a vast, seemingly infinite* number of shapes, limited only by our ability to model objectives toward which events can be classifie

I would argue every story has a vast, seemingly infinite* number of shapes, limited only by our ability to model objectives toward which events can be classified as positive or negative. Still, that doesn't make it a useless method of analysis because we can find objectives that can be applied across stories in a somewhat universal way. Or, authors can simply come up with objectives that they think might be interesting. *I suppose these numbers would be combinatorically constrained by a function of the number of graphemes/phonemes, and not actually infinite, but still huge.