Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (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 :)

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +3  
       Funny=3, Total=3
    Extra 'Funny' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (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.