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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: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday November 05 2018, @10:45AM (2 children)
To be fair, I'm having trouble framing Catch-22 in the context of a "story". To me it was just an interminably long roll-call of 'wacky' psychiatric patients with supposedly funny quirks and eccentricities. They never actually did anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @03:41PM
> Catch-22 in the context of a "story" ... They never actually did anything.
Maybe not for you, but Catch-22 turned my understanding of WWII upside down--hugely influential to me personally. The movie was also a major turning point, after watching it once (mid-70s, college), I left the theater so disoriented that I turned around and went back in to watch a second time and get my thoughts somewhat unscrambled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @04:30PM
Catch 22 is really about the craziness and irrationality of war. The people that are in the story are mostly engaged in rational reactions to an irrational situation. For example the guy that determines that the best way to extend is life is by being as bored as possible so that it seems like time is moving more slowly.
It's more or less an institutionalized story and it's related to popular media like mash and one flew over the cuckoo's nest.
There's different ways of slicing up the limited number of stories out there, I think 10 is a pretty good number of stories, 6 seems a bit too few as it requires even more consolidation and makes it hard to classify books like Catch 22.