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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: 2) by zocalo on Monday November 05 2018, @12:38PM (3 children)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @03:44PM (1 child)
so how is steady not an up --> down --> up or down --> up --> down, like EVERY other serial? A full reset at the end of each episode.
IV New Hope is up --> down --> up again ... so steady state over all but lost of plant (down) and lost of death star (up). Or from Empire view down --> up --> down. -- both stories are steady states overall, but not act by act.
IV thru Vi sub plot. boy meets girl (up), boy loses girl (down), boy found out sister (up-family AND down-loses girl that kissed me!) , pirate as in-law (WHAT???).
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Monday November 05 2018, @05:34PM
The flat plot trajectory actually occurs more often than you might think as it's quite a common A-plot format when writers need to shuffle pieces around the board during an overarcing storyline, although they'll generally use an inconsequential B-plot with more substance to keep things interesting. Another variation of this might be where a character gets moved off the board entirely, only to return at a later date when they are needed, e.g. any characters that take a leave of absense for a season or two. Or maybe "absent entirely" (or "null") is another corner case in its own right?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday November 05 2018, @10:44PM
This thread is starting to make me horny!
Up down up down....denial....headache...ah, it's gone.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---