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posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 05 2018, @09:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the which-one-is-a-new-hope? dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots

“My prettiest contribution to the culture” was how the novelist Kurt Vonnegut described his old master’s thesis in anthropology, “which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun”. The thesis sank without a trace, but Vonnegut continued throughout his life to promote the big idea behind it, which was: “stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper”.

In a 1995 lecture, Vonnegut chalked out various story arcs on a blackboard, plotting how the protagonist’s fortunes change over the course of the narrative on an axis stretching from ‘good’ to ‘ill’. The arcs include ‘man in hole’, in which the main character gets into trouble then gets out again (“people love that story, they never get sick of it!”) and ‘boy gets girl’, in which the protagonist finds something wonderful, loses it, then gets it back again at the end. “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers”, he remarked. “They are beautiful shapes.”

"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 – you could call them archetypes – that form the building blocks for more complex stories. The Vermont researchers describe the six story shapes behind more than 1700 English novels as:

1. Rags to riches – a steady rise from bad to good fortune

2. Riches to rags – a fall from good to bad, a tragedy

3. Icarus – a rise then a fall in fortune

4. Oedipus – a fall, a rise then a fall again

5. Cinderella – rise, fall, rise

6. Man in a hole – fall, rise

This came out a few months ago and only recently came to my attention again. Does this work with your favorite movies? How about episodes in your favorite TV series?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Monday November 05 2018, @10:02AM (20 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Monday November 05 2018, @10:02AM (#757910) Homepage Journal

    Every story in the world meets this pattern: "Something happens".

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @10:17AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @10:17AM (#757913)

    I guess you never watched seinfeld then :)

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @07:20PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @07:20PM (#758143)

      What is that show about?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @07:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @07:26PM (#758146)

        What is that show about?

        Nothing.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday November 05 2018, @07:30PM

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 05 2018, @07:30PM (#758150) Journal

        What is that show about?

        Keeping you just barely entertained enough to stick around until after the commercial break.

        Having the widest possible demographic appeal, without offending anyone, but not really appealing in any major way to anyone.

        The primary goal is to not be so bad that you switch the channel.

        --
        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 4, Touché) by driverless on Monday November 05 2018, @12:38PM (8 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Monday November 05 2018, @12:38PM (#757950)

    They forgot the seventh story shape:

    7. Friends - Nothing happens.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @02:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @02:00PM (#757974)

      Slice of life?

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by AndyTheAbsurd on Monday November 05 2018, @02:40PM (5 children)

      by AndyTheAbsurd (3958) on Monday November 05 2018, @02:40PM (#757985) Journal

      And the 8th story shape:

      8. Bad TV sci-fi - A bunch of stuff happens, but it doesn't change anything in the universe, so we can start the next episode just like we started the last one

      --
      Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
      • (Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday November 05 2018, @04:49PM

        by nitehawk214 (1304) on Monday November 05 2018, @04:49PM (#758048)

        Now it is the 9th shape:

        Nothing in the A-plot matters, and the only thing interesting to happen in the episode was 2 minutes of B-plot season story arc.

        --
        "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
      • (Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Monday November 05 2018, @07:33PM (1 child)

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 05 2018, @07:33PM (#758152) Journal

        You're talking about the recent movie A Wrinkle In Time.

        No continuity.

        No rhyme or reason for why things happen. Why the next event takes place. Now we're going to do this -- but no reason why. Just because. And the world works like this -- no reason why. That's just how it is. We're trying to accomplish something. But no reason why it even needs to be or should be accomplished.

        That's pretty much the plot. With a liberal helping of new age mumbo jumbo courtesy of Oprah.

        --
        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @12:02AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @12:02AM (#758276)

          Excuse me, your views on that film are problematic. Please learn to think correctly and have the right opinion about such brave films.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:41AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:41AM (#758416)

        There was a show, movie, or some youtube video I saw where it turns out that one of the kids has a literal "magic reset button." Whenever something crazy happens and the kid is done having his fun, he went into the closet, pulled out the box, and pressed it. Magically everything got reset to whenever the kid wanted it. IIRC, it ended with the kid eventually getting bored of the power and coming up with crazier and crazier schemes. He finally gets into a ton of trouble and tries to press it, only for it to click and nothing happen, flips it over and it says something like "limit 5000 presses."

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @08:11AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @08:11AM (#758420)

          It always stops working after the multiple rapes and murders.

    • (Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Monday November 05 2018, @11:36PM

      by el_oscuro (1711) on Monday November 05 2018, @11:36PM (#758268)

      Thought that was the explicit plot of "Seinfeld".

      --
      SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @03:19PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @03:19PM (#757999)

    Nothing happens:
    "Waiting for Godot"
    "My Dinner with Andre"
    ...

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Monday November 05 2018, @05:14PM (2 children)

      by tangomargarine (667) on Monday November 05 2018, @05:14PM (#758064)

      Waiting for Godot is really an anti-story. I took a 400-level course in college on those fucking weird Irish authors.

      Gaelic is a fucking weird language too, with words like "shillelagh" where none of the vowels make the sounds you would expect.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @07:53AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @07:53AM (#758419)

        Gaelic is just fine. Only one of the vowels in "shillelagh" is different from its phonetic representation. English on the other hand...

        • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:42PM

          by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:42PM (#758571)

          Only one of the vowels in "shillelagh" is different from its phonetic representation.

          Oh really. Shuh-LAY-lee matches which expected vowels? The I being "uh", the E being "ay", or the "agh" being "ee"?

          --
          "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @08:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @08:24PM (#758175)

    More accurately, I think we could sum the research up as "Change is essential to narrative."

    And there really aren't SIX plots -- the research says on a more nuanced level, many stories display more arcs. But denoting "fall" and "rise" with F and R, we just have here:

    (1) R
    (2) F
    (3) RF
    (4) FR
    (5) RFR
    (6) FRF

    The article notes if you "zoom in" on a narrative, you may see more ups and downs, so this series is just the arbitrary continuation of RFRFRFRFRFR... or FRFRFRFRFRFR...

    Yes, it's blindingly obvious, because narrative generally depends on change. If you don't have ANY change in a LONG story (note this is a study of novels, not short works), it's usually boring and no one will buy it. Imagine if a novel consisted of, "Today, in the land of Q, everything was wonderful. The next day, in the land of Q, everything continued to be wonderful." Even if the story described all the wonderful things that were happening in Q, a reader would begin to wonder about 5 or 10 or 20 pages in and likely stop reading. No change, no possibility of it, then no narrative. Boring.

    Alternatively, imagine a story in a future dystopia where there is no hope and everything is bad. ALL THE TIME. ALL THE TIME. No hope. None. Ever. Nobody fighting for change. Nothing changing. Why would anyone read it? It would be boring as hell.

    Even a tiny change is often magnified by good authors -- hence narrative and drama. Even if you wrote a short story of someone going to a shop and buying coffee, perhaps someone is in the way as they go in the door! Maybe there's a line! Maybe they're out of that brown "raw" sugar stuff and the protagonist has to deal with ramifications of using plain old white sugar!

    But then they get their coffee, and all is well again. The end.

    If there's no possibility of a change in state for any character (or more broadly, any entity) in a story, there's no narrative. And if there is change, it's likely to be dramatized by good authors, hence why this algorithm picked up on vocabulary or whatever indicating such changes. Even the idiotic coffee story could work as a narrative, but a good author would likely dramatize it by picking up on changes in condition of the protagonist (even ridiculous minor ones) and emphasize them in the text somehow to generate interest for a reader.

    So yeah, stories contain change. Without any change (whether rise or fall or cycles), you really don't have a narrative, let alone a story. And apparently it took researchers to discover this must be true!

  • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday November 05 2018, @10:46PM

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Monday November 05 2018, @10:46PM (#758243)

    Jasper Fforde has already parodied this idea. [wikipedia.org]

    His "improved" story telling OS* expanded to 32 possible plots though.

      .

      .

    *Sort of. You probably need to read it.

  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:23AM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday November 06 2018, @06:23AM (#758410) Journal

    Yeah, this is like saying that all living things are just collections of atoms and molecules. If some combination of "rise" and "fall" is all there is to stories, what would be the point of reading them? The whys and the details matter.

    This "every stories is a combination of 0 or more rises and falls" is a typical "missing the forest for the trees" tautological observation.