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Researchers analysed novels to reveal six story types
- sidkhanooja 3y agoIf this article interested you then I'd highly recommend checking out TVTropes (https://tvtropes.org/ https://tvtropes.org/) (trope roughly means any convention of fiction), if you've not already!
- yamrzou 3y agoThere are other frameworks for storytelling: - Booker's Seven Basic Plots - Friedman's Story Plots - Georges Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations - Reich's American Narratives Tobias' 20 Plots - Parker's Story Types - Classic Story Conflicts - Classic Story Types See: https://changingminds.org/disciplines/storytelling/plots/plots.htm https://changingminds.org/disciplines/storytelling/plots/plo...
- denton-scratch 3y agoJoseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces[0] posits the protagonist's journey from "the ordinary world", through numerous adventures and challenges, to eventual redemption or victory, as a universal story template. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces
- pavel_lishin 3y agoDon't forget Harvet Ismuth's 42 Essential 3rd Act Twists: https://dresdencodak.com/2009/05/11/42-essential-3rd-act-twists/ https://dresdencodak.com/2009/05/11/42-essential-3rd-act-twi...
- SamFold 3y agoI think my preference is Northrop Frye’s analysis in “Anatomy of Criticism”, his categories of “mythic”, “romantic”, “high mimetic”, “low mimetic”, “ironic” are particularly useful for analyzing the history of literature from mythic legends and epic poetry up to modern literature and fantasy. Although this analysis isn’t so much for general plot structure as much as for looking at characters and particularly the main protagonist and their relationship to other characters and the environment of the novel.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoThat is maybe because everyone’s life falls into a single basic plot: They are born, they develop, they die.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wongarsu 3y agoThe original paper [1] also contains some great graphs. And less hyperbole; these are the six basic plots of ~1400 English-language stories on Project Gutenberg, not of every story in the world, ever 1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07772.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07772.pdf
- kqr 3y agoThose plots are so much better. They also give a sense of the variation around the shape, and are less smoothed than in this article. Also thumbs up for using self-organising maps. Way underappreciated idea!
- all2 3y agoFor those like me who don't know what a self organizing map is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organizing_map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organizing_map A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-organizing feature map (SOFM) is an unsupervised machine learning technique used to produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional) representation of a higher dimensional data set while preserving the topological structure of the data.
- jimmySixDOF 3y agoThere is also the Kurt Vonnegut "Shape of Stories" concept where he has 8 basic universal plot lines graphed out back in the 1940s https://thestory.au/articles/kurt-vonnegut-story-shapes/ https://thestory.au/articles/kurt-vonnegut-story-shapes/
- simbolit 3y agoI hate that they talk about 8 plot lines, but only show graphics for 5.
- frontiersummit 3y agoSkimming the paper: it looks like they are performing sentiment analysis on books, effectively taking the Fourier transform of the sentiment-versus-time data, and reporting which Fourier component (up to 3rd harmonic) is strongest.
- rickdeckard 3y agoIn summary, resorted: 1. Rags to riches: RISE 2. Riches to rags: FALL -- 3. Icarus: RISE, FALL 6. Man in a hole: FALL, RISE -- 4. Oedipus: FALL, RISE, FALL 5. Cinderella: RISE, FALL, RISE -- So every story can be framed by putting brackets somewhere in this sequence: RISE, FALL, RISE, FALL Now....what to do with this highly-abstracted level of information...? It's like saying all music in the world consists of some form of "lower note, higher note, lower note, higher note"
- voisin 3y ago> So every story can be framed by putting brackets somewhere in this sequence: RISE, FALL, RISE, FALL Even more abstract: CONFLICT, CONFLICT, CONFLICT, … Perhaps any story not rooted in conflicts would be horribly boring and so not re-told?
- randall 3y agoYou can make a really boring series of events interesting, but without a payoff it doesn’t feel like it’s worth it. Example: I woke up this morning really really early… I checked my charging Apple Watch and noticed it was 2:15. I got up and noticed how quiet it was… like incredibly quiet. I put on my shoes and walked toward the stairs, and it was eerie how little sound there was. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, it was still even quieter. —- This is literally what happened this morning, but the mention of “quiet” puts a question in your head: why is the author mentioning how quiet it is!? Isn’t it always quiet at 2am?? That will get you to invest in the story and there’s no conflict. But then if the ending was “yeah it’s just always quiet” you wouldn’t have learned anything new, and there’s no reason to share / recommend / reread the story. Basically this is why JJ abrahms movies are fun to watch until they’re over.
- kqr 3y agoYour episode does have an implicit conflict, though, and it's precisely the one you're saying: you have set up an implicit conflict between your auditory perception and expectation. (Actually, there's another implicit conflict in there which I would argue is perhaps even more important: why did you wake up so early, and why did you choose to go down the stairs instead of back to sleep?)
- mcphage 3y agoYes, but... so what? We see this type of analysis often, but I never see where it gets used to help understand something new, or make anything more clear. How do stories written with each of those plots differ? Do they vary in popularity over time? Why only those six, why not Rise-Fall-Rise-Fall or Fall-Rise-Fall-Rise? Etc.
- beardyw 3y agoPlotto by William Wallace Cook https://www.futilitycloset.com/2022/03/30/tale-spinner/ https://www.futilitycloset.com/2022/03/30/tale-spinner/
- dghf 3y agoAccording to John Gardner (or possibly Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy, or someone else entirely -- attributions differ), there are only two basic plots: 1. Someone comes to town 2. Someone leaves town
- blowski 3y agoDostoyevsky and Tolstoy are exemplary here. It's not whether the characters rise or fall, it's _how_. The plots of both Anna Karenina and "Crime and Punishment" seem pretty unoriginal, but my gosh, the journey while you read them is incredible.
- bena 3y agoChange is a catalyst. And all stories are stories of change.
- madcaptenor 3y agoQuote Investigator can't track down the original words but the earliest attribution is to Gardner: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/05/06/two-plots/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/05/06/two-plots/
- keiferski 3y agoI like David Lynch’s approach to storytelling, which mostly doesn’t follow these basic plots: Accepted into the institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies in 1970, Lynch studied with the Czechoslovak film maker Frank Daniel, whose course on film analysis shaped his writing and directing habits. “It’s a simple thing he taught me,” says Lynch. “If you want to make a feature film, you get ideas for 70 scenes. Put them on 3-by-5 cards. As soon as you have 70, you have a feature film.” Except that he now dictates to an assistant, Lynch still works this way.
- jprete 3y agoThere’s a lot to unpack in the word “scene”. Every scene itself is either a needed part of a story, or a story in and of itself, except that the meaning relies on the context of the whole work.
- all2 3y agoI don't remember if it was Rogue One or another of the SW franchise, but they actually backed their way into the plot but first picking scenes from other movies and then stitching them together.
- fauxreb 3y agoThis led me to an amazing NYT profile of Lynch from 1990: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/14/magazine/a-dark-lens-on-america.html https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/14/magazine/a-dark-lens-on-a...
- incomingpain 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots Even 7 isn't quite correct, technically there are loads of others but they aren't successful plots.
- valyagolev 3y agoBorges: "There are only four stories: the siege of the city, the return home, the quest, and the sacrifice of a God"
- gentleman11 3y agoYou can shoehorn “all stories” into all sorts of frameworks. I personally find this really limits what stories can be and leads to decade after decade of lazy writing done by people who believed these commentators. Eg, heroes journey is actually a bunch of techniques, not just one, and some stories don’t even have characters at all
- bena 3y agoI think all stories will find themselves in these patterns, but it's important to let the story find the pattern rather than the other way around. I doubt that the person who came up with the story of Icarus was attempting to do RISE, FALL explicitly. Although, it's also important to be open to new paradigms. If you believe that there are only two stories: RISE and FALL, you can find yourself stretching metaphors to their breaking point to make stories fit in a box.
- Eliezer 3y agoEvery story? Now there's a false title. _Project Lawful_ for example has a sufficiently complex plot with enough opposed character perspectives that you'd have to really work to hammer it into this pigeonhole. Maybe one particular character arc could be said to have this structure. More generally, any story that changes between character perspectives and evolves in who holds narrative force will have a hard time being analyzed this way.
- t_mann 3y agoIf you condense every text passage into a one-dimensional sentiment score, then all texts are going to look like graphs of rising and falling sentiments to you. Nothing unexpected there. I actually liked the charts, but I didn't see much evidence that there's anything universal at play here that isn't just an artifact of this methodology.
- notahacker 3y agoI did like it labelling the Ugly Duckling plot as "complex", relative to Shakespeare and Flaubert and Dante :D
- plussed_reader 3y agoSounds like a paraphrasing of Kurt Vonneguts 'Shape of a story' presentation.
- ktzar 3y agoVladimir Propp already analysed the basic structural elements of Russian folk tales, down to 31 elements, and drafter how these units formed classic Russian tales. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp There's been further efforts to analyse his work https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12559-015-9338-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12559-015-9338-8
- ggambetta 3y agoTime to share again my reverse-engineering of Dan Brown's novels![0] I did this as an exercise almost 10 years ago now (wow!), resulting in my own novel[1], which you could describe as somewhat Dan Brown-like. [0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HdlD_tmmm1D0zX1JgXzFVSFB9nk6LT_DMDnsIPugl0M/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HdlD_tmmm1D0zX1JgXzF... [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QPBYGFI https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QPBYGFI
- numinos1 3y agoI met Dan Brown at an event where he stated that (Writing the Blockbuster Novel)[https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Blockbuster-Novel-Albert-Zuckerman/dp/0898795982 https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Blockbuster-Novel-Albert-Zuck...] was the formula he used to write his books.
- ggambetta 3y agoI wonder how I missed that book. Thanks!
- jerrygoyal 3y agoon a deeper level, every good story has contrast.
- rickdeckard 3y agoIt could be even more simplified to define stories as a series of SETUP, PAYOFF. - Person becomes rich/poor: Setup to what is about to happen - Person becomes poor/rich again: Pay-off Albeit, it has equally low value on what actually makes it a story...
- Swizec 3y agoVonnegut was right! Here’s a great lecture where he explains the 8 shapes of stories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ
- uncomputation 3y agoThe reporting on this study is conflating sentiment with plot structure, which misrepresents the study. See for example, Frankenstein. The sentiment rises slightly during the Creature’s narration to Victor of his circumstances - likely the narration of the French family he was “living”/stowing away with - but that’s certainly not a “rise” in the sense Oedipus rises to noble status. It’s hard to interpret Frankenstein as anything other than the protagonist’s consistent and tragic downfall (riches to rags in this analysis). Not sure if that’s fundamentally a problem trying to extrapolate plot beats from sentiment alone, or a bit of less than accurate journalism.
- nottorp 3y agoI suppose it's these simplified views of storytelling that brought us Netflix quality entertainment.
- fluidcruft 3y agoI guess you need SVD to figure out that if you have two emotional trajectory states (rise or fall) that these can only toggle (since "rise, rise" is just a bigger "rise" and "fall, fall" is just a bigger "fall"). So you pick the initial emotional state and then toggle however many states are in the story. If you have at most three states then you get 2*3 trajectories. 1. rise 2. fall 3. rise, fall 4. fall, rise 5. rise, fall, rise 6. fall, rise, fall Sorry, I don't find this particularly insightful. The insight would have been if certain sequence lengths were more important or excluded. Or other parameters about the states.
- kouru225 3y agoI always felt like we could mathematically define stories but I wasn’t sure how until I learned about Chaos Theory. There are some stories that seem to be very simple geometric, discrete shapes, but I think if you look at any story you’ll find a level of noise and chaos in there somewhere. The more a story approaches real life, the more chaotic it gets. I think Cassavetes is a great example of this. Recently I’ve been thinking about narrative in terms of lossy compression, which can then be connected to our everyday perception, which uses compression to understand reality since we can’t ingest all the information we receive. Narratives differ in how much detail they delete, which then makes each narrative a compression algorithm. Movies with more detail like Cassavetes or the Italian Neorealists are usually considered “artsy” while movies with very little detail are considered “trashy.” This realization helped me talk about movies without prejudice.
- Detrytus 3y agoFor movies it is seven types: 1. Man vs Man. 2. Man vs Dog. 3. Dog vs Zombie. 4. James Bond. 5. Stories of Kings and Lords. 6. Women Over 50 Finding Themselves After Divorce. 7. Car Commercial.
- OhioMan2943 3y agoIs this the type of thing that warrants research? I think that we're able to discern these types on our own pretty well
- rajnathani 3y agoGood luck fitting the Game of Thrones book(s) into this. Also, in general a narrative suspense/drama wouldn’t fall into this, for example “twelve angry men”.