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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?
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Monday November 05 2018, @10:21AM (4 children)
We could have had a nice aristarchus submission! (Wait! Before you mod in anger, consider, my fellow Soylentils, the irony of the request? "Man in the Hole", is it not? The Count of Montecrisco, lubing up to fight the alt-right in the den of iniquity that is the Blog of The Minority Blizzard?) Or, something else. But Vonnegut was good. Damn good. Player Piano, for example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @10:30AM (2 children)
Man in the hole? Lubing up to fight the alt-right? The front page can do without your homoerotic obsessions.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @10:54AM (1 child)
Well, he is Greek.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 06 2018, @10:39PM
Ah, now I understand why my right Alt key is labelled "Alt Gr" :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @12:29PM
There's only one basic plop in a stinking aristarchy submission.