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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) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @08:24PM
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!