[HN Gopher] Researchers analysed novels to reveal six story types
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Researchers analysed novels to reveal six story types
Author : yamrzou
Score : 77 points
Date : 2023-11-09 13:23 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| sidkhanooja wrote:
| If this article interested you then I'd highly recommend checking
| out TVTropes (https://tvtropes.org/) (trope roughly means any
| convention of fiction), if you've not already!
| mbork_pl wrote:
| Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/609/
| Sebb767 wrote:
| The alt-text even mentions cracked.com. Makes one feel
| nostalgic.
| yamrzou wrote:
| There are other frameworks for storytelling:
|
| - Booker's Seven Basic Plots
|
| - Friedman's Story Plots
|
| - Georges Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations
|
| - Reich's American Narratives Tobias' 20 Plots
|
| - Parker's Story Types
|
| - Classic Story Conflicts
|
| - Classic Story Types
|
| See:
| https://changingminds.org/disciplines/storytelling/plots/plo...
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Joseph Campbell's _The Hero With a Thousand Faces_ [0] posits
| the protagonist's journey from "the ordinary world", through
| numerous adventures and challenges, to eventual redemption or
| victory, as a universal story template.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Don't forget Harvet Ismuth's 42 Essential 3rd Act Twists:
| https://dresdencodak.com/2009/05/11/42-essential-3rd-act-twi...
| SamFold wrote:
| I think my preference is Northrop Frye's analysis in "Anatomy
| of Criticism", his categories of "mythic", "romantic", "high
| mimetic", "low mimetic", "ironic" are particularly useful for
| analyzing the history of literature from mythic legends and
| epic poetry up to modern literature and fantasy.
|
| Although this analysis isn't so much for general plot structure
| as much as for looking at characters and particularly the main
| protagonist and their relationship to other characters and the
| environment of the novel.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| That is maybe because everyone's life falls into a single basic
| plot:
|
| They are born, they develop, they die.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The original paper [1] also contains some great graphs. And less
| hyperbole; these are the six basic plots of ~1400 English-
| language stories on Project Gutenberg, not of every story in the
| world, ever
|
| 1: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07772.pdf
| kqr wrote:
| Those plots are so much better. They also give a sense of the
| variation around the shape, and are less smoothed than in this
| article.
|
| Also thumbs up for using self-organising maps. Way
| underappreciated idea!
| all2 wrote:
| For those like me who don't know what a self organizing map
| is
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organizing_map
| A self-organizing map (SOM) or self-organizing feature map
| (SOFM) is an unsupervised machine learning technique used to
| produce a low-dimensional (typically two-dimensional)
| representation of a higher dimensional data set while
| preserving the topological structure of the data.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| There is also the Kurt Vonnegut "Shape of Stories" concept
| where he has 8 basic universal plot lines graphed out back in
| the 1940s
|
| https://thestory.au/articles/kurt-vonnegut-story-shapes/
| simbolit wrote:
| I hate that they talk about 8 plot lines, but only show
| graphics for 5.
| frontiersummit wrote:
| Skimming the paper: it looks like they are performing sentiment
| analysis on books, effectively taking the Fourier transform of
| the sentiment-versus-time data, and reporting which Fourier
| component (up to 3rd harmonic) is strongest.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| I don't see why they stop at the third harmonic, as opposed
| to the second or the fourth.
| trombonechamp wrote:
| Looks like these are just phantom oscillations, a statistical
| artifact of doing SVD/PCA on smooth data:
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.20.545619v1
|
| You get the same patterns in music:
| https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/67945245/000016_2_.pdf
| Kevin09210 wrote:
| More great "diagrams" from mathematician Jean Petitot applying
| Rene Thom's morphodynamic models to the study of the canonical
| formula of myths (Levy-Strauss).
|
| about 2/3rd in:
| https://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/hom_0439-4216_1988_num_28_106...
| everybodyknows wrote:
| 2016, and the BBC article is 2018.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| In summary, resorted:
|
| 1. Rags to riches: RISE
|
| 2. Riches to rags: FALL
|
| --
|
| 3. Icarus: RISE, FALL
|
| 6. Man in a hole: FALL, RISE
|
| --
|
| 4. Oedipus: FALL, RISE, FALL
|
| 5. Cinderella: RISE, FALL, RISE
|
| --
|
| So every story can be framed by putting brackets somewhere in
| this sequence: RISE, FALL, RISE, FALL
|
| Now....what to do with this highly-abstracted level of
| information...?
|
| It's like saying all music in the world consists of some form of
| "lower note, higher note, lower note, higher note"
| voisin wrote:
| > So every story can be framed by putting brackets somewhere in
| this sequence: RISE, FALL, RISE, FALL
|
| Even more abstract: CONFLICT, CONFLICT, CONFLICT, ...
|
| Perhaps any story not rooted in conflicts would be horribly
| boring and so not re-told?
| randall wrote:
| You can make a really boring series of events interesting,
| but without a payoff it doesn't feel like it's worth it.
|
| Example:
|
| I woke up this morning really really early... I checked my
| charging Apple Watch and noticed it was 2:15. I got up and
| noticed how quiet it was... like incredibly quiet. I put on
| my shoes and walked toward the stairs, and it was eerie how
| little sound there was.
|
| When I got to the bottom of the stairs, it was still even
| quieter.
|
| ---
|
| This is literally what happened this morning, but the mention
| of "quiet" puts a question in your head: why is the author
| mentioning how quiet it is!? Isn't it always quiet at 2am??
|
| That will get you to invest in the story and there's no
| conflict. But then if the ending was "yeah it's just always
| quiet" you wouldn't have learned anything new, and there's no
| reason to share / recommend / reread the story.
|
| Basically this is why JJ abrahms movies are fun to watch
| until they're over.
| kqr wrote:
| Your episode does have an implicit conflict, though, and
| it's precisely the one you're saying: you have set up an
| implicit conflict between your auditory perception and
| expectation.
|
| (Actually, there's another implicit conflict in there which
| I would argue is perhaps even more important: why did you
| wake up so early, and why did you choose to go down the
| stairs instead of back to sleep?)
| yamrzou wrote:
| So what makes the story interesting here is the encounter
| of something _unexpected_.
|
| Reminds me of _That 's interesting! (1971)_
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36156400)
| voisin wrote:
| If you carried on this story though, without any conflict
| (note: I agree with sibling comment that there is actually
| implicit conflict between actual vs expectations), wouldn't
| it be incredibly boring or lead to a "so why are you
| retelling this?" response?
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Even more abstract: CONFLICT, CONFLICT, CONFLICT, ...
|
| How about this: alternating sequences of THINGS CHANGING and
| THINGS NOT CHANGING.
| Aerroon wrote:
| Another way to explain it is that popular stories are a chain
| of buildups and payoffs for the reader. The core of it is that
| unlikeable characters get misfortune and likeable characters
| get fortune.
|
| Amateur authors and stories based on real life events can break
| the mold. I think that's why both can be quite popular.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Explain don quixote then.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > The core of it is that unlikeable characters get misfortune
| and likeable characters get fortune.
|
| I don't think that's really true, though. Tragedies are a
| very popular type of story.
|
| Indeed - a big part of the reason for the success of "A Game
| of Thrones" is because they violated genre tropes and killed
| off likable main characters.
| function_seven wrote:
| And to reinforce your point, the later seasons suffered (in
| part!) due to the plot armor that suddenly enveloped the
| main characters.
|
| Among other reasons.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yup, and these are certainly not "plots" by any definition of
| the word.
|
| They're one aspect of story, along with a hundred others.
|
| > _Now....what to do with this highly-abstracted level of
| information...?_
|
| If you're a reader/watcher, nothing.
|
| If you're a writer... ensure that it's clear. So much of
| writing is about showing your draft to a friend/teacher/etc.,
| finding out that they didn't "get it" because what you wrote
| was confusing, and rewriting to make the thing clearer.
|
| If somebody reads your script and they're like, well the
| protagonist clearly FELL but then the only KINDA ROSE but KINDA
| STAYED THERE and I don't get what the point is? Are you trying
| to say their efforts were worthwhile or futile? And then the
| writer is going to do much better if they change the story to
| become clearly either "FALL" or "FALL, RISE" -- instead of a
| muddy in-between.
|
| Also: this pattern is fractal. Every _scene_ is generally
| either a FALL or RISE for the main characters in it (if one
| character rises, the other falls). And then, depending on how
| you define them, each _act_ is similarly a reversal (especially
| e.g. in a 5-act TV episode). This is what keeps story
| interesting. But over the course of all of these ups and downs,
| the author needs to decide what the biggest pattern is going to
| be.
| tobr wrote:
| Are you a writer or are you guessing?
|
| Craig Mazin and John August have often argued on
| Scriptnotes[1] that this type of structural perspective can
| be useful for analysis, but not when writing. For example,
| you can often think of a movie as having three acts, but
| knowing that doesn't help you write the movie. It's more a
| symptom of good writing than a recipe.
|
| 1: https://scriptnotes.net/
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm adjacent to it.
|
| One of the first things you usually do as part of planning
| a season of a dramatic TV show is to figure out the arc of
| each character, up or down. You can't get anywhere unless
| you know where you're going. And then yes, it's similarly
| an extremely conscious part of the writing process at the
| episode level, act level, and scene level. It's very much
| "recipe" in that sense -- but that's not to take away from
| any of the creativity. It's just the basic structure _for_
| creativity, the frame.
|
| Now, of course, it's recipe _because_ of lots of trial and
| error in writing stories and seeing what stories worked and
| which didn 't. If you're writing something shorter like a
| movie, you may very well implement the pattern on your own
| through intuition. But you also may very well not, and the
| script will have problems, and rewriting will be a lot more
| successful if you're aware of structure and not just
| relying on intuition.
| projektfu wrote:
| But then you have books of rules like "Save the Cat!" that
| identify a lot of beats that you do usually find in
| screenplays. Maybe not all the ones are in every script,
| but it's uncanny how the midpoint is almost always as
| described to where you can pause it when you feel the beat
| and you're halfway through the film.
| bnralt wrote:
| > If somebody reads your script and they're like, well the
| protagonist clearly FELL but then the only KINDA ROSE but
| KINDA STAYED THERE and I don't get what the point is? Are you
| trying to say their efforts were worthwhile or futile? And
| then the writer is going to do much better if they change the
| story to become clearly either "FALL" or "FALL, RISE" --
| instead of a muddy in-between.
|
| Plenty of good stories have ambiguous endings. That's
| actually one of the issues with this article - even when
| things are abstracted to the point of absurdity like they are
| here, it still doesn't cover all stories.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Plenty of good stories have ambiguous endings._
|
| But they still generally follow the pattern. Probably the
| most common "ambiguous" ending is where protagonist gets
| what the WANT (seems like a RISE) but not what they
| actually NEED (so it's _actually_ a FALL). Or vice-versa,
| the don 't get what they WANT (seems like a FALL), but they
| _do_ get what they NEED (so actually a RISE).
|
| So the "ambiguous" ending is not usually about not
| following RISE/FALL structure -- it's leaving you to argue
| about whether the RISE/FALL was _good or bad_. (E.g. he
| lost his Wall St job but gained a family, he conquered the
| mountain but his best friends died along the way.)
| euroderf wrote:
| Sounds like a good subject of Fourier analysis.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > It's like saying all music in the world consists of some form
| of "lower note, higher note, lower note, higher note"
|
| Tell it to John Cage.
| blowski wrote:
| John Cage is not all the music in the world.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| I think you're mixing up your universal and existential
| qualifiers.
| jerf wrote:
| It's a fractal. You don't have complete freedom across the
| entire space of "stories" to just pick one; most such randomly
| selected stories would be just random things that happen for no
| in-story reason, then the putative story simply ends. A top-
| level RISE/FALL/RISE structure can add interest to the story.
| But then within that there is a fractal of other options,
| because if that's literally all your story has, once again it's
| not really _that_ interesting. You can keep descending down
| gather up more and more detail.
|
| Sometimes someone discovers a little undiscovered tributary, or
| does a really good job with something like Memento.
|
| On the one hand, there is order to the space more than just
| "things happen, then they stop". On the other hand, like a good
| fractal, you really can't classify the whole space of stories
| with metaphorical rectangles on the diagram. No matter what
| rectangle you draw around romance, you're going to get every
| other genre mixed in at least a little bit, and so on for all
| the other things you can try to draw.
|
| As one gets more experienced with stories, one's interest tends
| to "zoom in". A kid may be satisfied with a simple hero story.
| As you get older, the hero story itself may be of little
| interest, but you are more interested in the fractal bits
| within it; the quality of the characterization, twists, plays
| on expectation. Later you may find interest in underlying
| philosophical themes and so on. Or, you can miss these finer
| details and become exhausted with stories believing you've seen
| them all, which despite how it may sound like I'm
| characterizing it here, isn't necessarily the worst thing ever.
| There's all sorts of things in the world and you can't become
| master connoisseurs of them all.
| iicc wrote:
| >It's like saying all music in the world consists of some form
| of "lower note, higher note, lower note, higher note"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsons_code
| madcaptenor wrote:
| OK, but that's actually useful for information retrieval.
| mcphage wrote:
| Yes, but... so what? We see this type of analysis often, but I
| never see where it gets used to help understand something new, or
| make anything more clear. How do stories written with each of
| those plots differ? Do they vary in popularity over time? Why
| only those six, why not Rise-Fall-Rise-Fall or Fall-Rise-Fall-
| Rise? Etc.
| beardyw wrote:
| Plotto by William Wallace Cook
|
| https://www.futilitycloset.com/2022/03/30/tale-spinner/
| dghf wrote:
| According to John Gardner (or possibly Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy,
| or someone else entirely -- attributions differ), there are only
| two basic plots:
|
| 1. Someone comes to town
|
| 2. Someone leaves town
| blowski wrote:
| Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy are exemplary here. It's not whether
| the characters rise or fall, it's _how_. The plots of both Anna
| Karenina and "Crime and Punishment" seem pretty unoriginal, but
| my gosh, the journey while you read them is incredible.
| bena wrote:
| Change is a catalyst. And all stories are stories of change.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Quote Investigator can't track down the original words but the
| earliest attribution is to Gardner:
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/05/06/two-plots/
| keiferski wrote:
| I like David Lynch's approach to storytelling, which mostly
| doesn't follow these basic plots:
|
| _Accepted into the institute's Center for Advanced Film Studies
| in 1970, Lynch studied with the Czechoslovak film maker Frank
| Daniel, whose course on film analysis shaped his writing and
| directing habits. "It's a simple thing he taught me," says Lynch.
| "If you want to make a feature film, you get ideas for 70 scenes.
| Put them on 3-by-5 cards. As soon as you have 70, you have a
| feature film." Except that he now dictates to an assistant, Lynch
| still works this way._
| jprete wrote:
| There's a lot to unpack in the word "scene". Every scene itself
| is either a needed part of a story, or a story in and of
| itself, except that the meaning relies on the context of the
| whole work.
| all2 wrote:
| I don't remember if it was _Rogue One_ or another of the SW
| franchise, but they actually backed their way into the plot
| but first picking scenes from other movies and then stitching
| them together.
| fauxreb wrote:
| This led me to an amazing NYT profile of Lynch from 1990:
| https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/14/magazine/a-dark-lens-on-a...
| incomingpain wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots
|
| Even 7 isn't quite correct, technically there are loads of others
| but they aren't successful plots.
| valyagolev wrote:
| Borges: "There are only four stories: the siege of the city, the
| return home, the quest, and the sacrifice of a God"
| gentleman11 wrote:
| You can shoehorn "all stories" into all sorts of frameworks. I
| personally find this really limits what stories can be and leads
| to decade after decade of lazy writing done by people who
| believed these commentators. Eg, heroes journey is actually a
| bunch of techniques, not just one, and some stories don't even
| have characters at all
| bena wrote:
| I think all stories will find themselves in these patterns, but
| it's important to let the story find the pattern rather than
| the other way around.
|
| I doubt that the person who came up with the story of Icarus
| was attempting to do RISE, FALL explicitly.
|
| Although, it's also important to be open to new paradigms. If
| you believe that there are only two stories: RISE and FALL, you
| can find yourself stretching metaphors to their breaking point
| to make stories fit in a box.
| Eliezer wrote:
| _Every_ story? Now there 's a false title. _Project Lawful_ for
| example has a sufficiently complex plot with enough opposed
| character perspectives that you'd have to really work to hammer
| it into this pigeonhole. Maybe one particular character arc could
| be said to have this structure.
|
| More generally, any story that changes between character
| perspectives and evolves in who holds narrative force will have a
| hard time being analyzed this way.
| t_mann wrote:
| If you condense every text passage into a one-dimensional
| sentiment score, then all texts are going to look like graphs of
| rising and falling sentiments to you. Nothing unexpected there.
|
| I actually liked the charts, but I didn't see much evidence that
| there's anything universal at play here that isn't just an
| artifact of this methodology.
| notahacker wrote:
| I did like it labelling the Ugly Duckling plot as "complex",
| relative to Shakespeare and Flaubert and Dante :D
| plussed_reader wrote:
| Sounds like a paraphrasing of Kurt Vonneguts 'Shape of a story'
| presentation.
| ktzar wrote:
| Vladimir Propp already analysed the basic structural elements of
| Russian folk tales, down to 31 elements, and drafter how these
| units formed classic Russian tales.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp There's been further
| efforts to analyse his work
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12559-015-9338-8
| ggambetta wrote:
| Time to share again my reverse-engineering of Dan Brown's
| novels![0]
|
| I did this as an exercise almost 10 years ago now (wow!),
| resulting in my own novel[1], which you could describe as
| somewhat Dan Brown-like.
|
| [0]
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HdlD_tmmm1D0zX1JgXzF...
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QPBYGFI
| numinos1 wrote:
| I met Dan Brown at an event where he stated that (Writing the
| Blockbuster Novel)[https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Blockbuster-
| Novel-Albert-Zuck...] was the formula he used to write his
| books.
| ggambetta wrote:
| I wonder how I missed that book. Thanks!
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| on a deeper level, every good story has contrast.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| It could be even more simplified to define stories as a series of
| SETUP, PAYOFF.
|
| - Person becomes rich/poor: Setup to what is about to happen
|
| - Person becomes poor/rich again: Pay-off
|
| Albeit, it has equally low value on what actually makes it a
| story...
| Swizec wrote:
| Vonnegut was right! Here's a great lecture where he explains the
| 8 shapes of stories.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ
| uncomputation wrote:
| The reporting on this study is conflating sentiment with plot
| structure, which misrepresents the study.
|
| See for example, Frankenstein. The sentiment rises slightly
| during the Creature's narration to Victor of his circumstances -
| likely the narration of the French family he was "living"/stowing
| away with - but that's certainly not a "rise" in the sense
| Oedipus rises to noble status. It's hard to interpret
| Frankenstein as anything other than the protagonist's consistent
| and tragic downfall (riches to rags in this analysis).
|
| Not sure if that's fundamentally a problem trying to extrapolate
| plot beats from sentiment alone, or a bit of less than accurate
| journalism.
| nottorp wrote:
| I suppose it's these simplified views of storytelling that
| brought us Netflix quality entertainment.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| I guess you need SVD to figure out that if you have two emotional
| trajectory states (rise or fall) that these can only toggle
| (since "rise, rise" is just a bigger "rise" and "fall, fall" is
| just a bigger "fall"). So you pick the initial emotional state
| and then toggle however many states are in the story. If you have
| at most three states then you get 2*3 trajectories.
|
| 1. rise 2. fall
|
| 3. rise, fall 4. fall, rise
|
| 5. rise, fall, rise 6. fall, rise, fall
|
| Sorry, I don't find this particularly insightful. The insight
| would have been if certain sequence lengths were more important
| or excluded. Or other parameters about the states.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I always felt like we could mathematically define stories but I
| wasn't sure how until I learned about Chaos Theory. There are
| some stories that seem to be very simple geometric, discrete
| shapes, but I think if you look at any story you'll find a level
| of noise and chaos in there somewhere. The more a story
| approaches real life, the more chaotic it gets. I think
| Cassavetes is a great example of this. Recently I've been
| thinking about narrative in terms of lossy compression, which can
| then be connected to our everyday perception, which uses
| compression to understand reality since we can't ingest all the
| information we receive. Narratives differ in how much detail they
| delete, which then makes each narrative a compression algorithm.
| Movies with more detail like Cassavetes or the Italian
| Neorealists are usually considered "artsy" while movies with very
| little detail are considered "trashy." This realization helped me
| talk about movies without prejudice.
| Detrytus wrote:
| For movies it is seven types:
|
| 1. Man vs Man.
|
| 2. Man vs Dog.
|
| 3. Dog vs Zombie.
|
| 4. James Bond.
|
| 5. Stories of Kings and Lords.
|
| 6. Women Over 50 Finding Themselves After Divorce.
|
| 7. Car Commercial.
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