Researchers analysed 1700 novels to reveal six story types
bbc.com
bbc.com
That said, of course not every story fits into some basic set of plot outlines without some serious mental acrobatics. Plot isn't even necessary, what's necessary is getting inside people's heads. The classic plots (however they're formulated) are all good ways to do that but you can also do that with meandering unstructured prose, if you're good enough, though few people are and the further you get from universal tricks the more likely you are to run into serious disagreements over who writes really good nonconformist stories.
Maybe a good example is dialog. The beginner's mistake is to write as if people are listening and responding to what the other has said. e.g.
"Hey Joe, what's up?"
"Just whippin' up some breakfast."
versus
"Hey Joe, what's up?"
"Jesus, you look like shit. Want some breakfast?"
In the second example the reader fills in the blanks mentally. It creates engagement. Do that in the small throughout your book and few people will complain that you lack a plot. Easier said than done.
Plots are good. Use them. But they're not the whole, uh, story.
"Show, don't tell" is not necessarily appropriate in news. News and writing for entertainment serve such radically different goals that it's worth carefully considering to what extent the same methods and models fit both.
When someone reads creative writing, they derive enjoyment from the mental reconstruction of the scene, the characters' intentions, etc. The writer may want the story to afford multiple interpretations and reward multiple readings.
But with news, the reader often just wants information. They may not be able to devote their full attention to the story, and they may lack the necessary contextual information to connect the dots you have laid out before them. The reliable transmission of information is more important than stimulating or entertaining the reader.
For less obvious lies, it would be helpful to lead with the truth (see the primacy effect on memory). After stating the truth, then you can say "but politican X said Y".
In my opinion, news has nothing to do with objective information. It has everything to do with entertainment.
I don't watch or read the news, specifically for that reason.
Plots are a great tool in that they have that part built in.
I'm several champagnes in at this point on a transatlantic flight and we're landing but I'll go through my list of fave writing books when I get settled
* Secrets of Story by Matt Bird
* Anatomy of Story by John Truby
* Breakout Novelist by Donald Maass
* Self Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King
Enjoy!
Take that thought in the other direction - how to communicate more efficiently - and you end up with snappy movie dialogue and non-verbal interaction that can push a plot forward really quickly.
With any kind of communication the challenges involve a mix of both knowing what techniques are possible, and having messages worth focusing those techniques on.
They all are kinda true, for the same reason you can find the proof of UFO in the Bible, or determine that there are "two kinds of people", or discover 4 personality types. Anything can be shoehorned into any kind of pattern if your definition is vague enough and you're willing to stretch the meaning of things hard enough.
Different writers are familiar with different structures and use ones they prefer, bending and modifying them as they wish. Some writers break the rules on purpose. Some writers get high out of their minds and write stream of consciousness novels in a weekend. Any of that can result in a great/famous/successful story. Finding the pattern that fits all of that is only possible if it's so vague that it can fit literally anything, at which point it becomes meaningless.
Plots and story structures can be picked up and used when it's convenient, it's easier to write when you have a paint-by-numbers structure to hang your story upon, but there isn't the one story structure or the six story types, that's silly.
However, the video linked to in the article appears to end before the most interesting part.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-84vuR1f90
Hamlet. It's never clear whether what's happening belongs more toward the good or bad side of the vertical axis.
The curve you get is a flat horizontal line. That's art. Never clearly good or bad but profound ambiguity.
Also, for those interested in the systematic (graphical) formulation of stories, check out StoryGrid:
Maybe. It's also death.
A poor man finds a magic lamp. He summons the genie, and wishes for great fortune. (Rags to riches.) He makes another wish, and it horribly backfires. (Icarus.) No longer trusting genies, he wishes he'd never found the lamp. The genie rewinds time. A poor man finds a magic lamp.... (Infinite loop plot not included in the classification.)
EDIT: Downvoter, how would you classify this story?
Early in the run it'll come across as kinda corny, but mid-way through the run it'll be a strong episode and one fans will cite as a favorite forever.
Another counter example: https://serprex.github.io/w/Ad%20nauseum%20ad%20nauseum
This is a story I started writing last year, it doesn't have rises & falls, just someone reminiscing on the way to the corner store for a bag of chips
If my writing doesn't count since it's just some random page on the internet, there's Bob Dylan's Tarantula, & he's won a Nobel for literature. You'll be forced to say "Every story has one these six basic plots, where a story must have a plot, & a plot must be composed of rises & falls" since anything that would go against that gets categorized as a "sub story" or "not part of the story"
I also disagree with the contention that all "stories" have to fit the patterns, unless you narrow the definition of story to fit the patterns.
A poor man uses all his money to buy a horse. "You must be happy", his neighbor says. "I don't know", answers the man.
The next day, the horse escapes. "Your hard-earned money, and your horse, both gone. You must be sad", his neighbor says. "I don't know", answers the man.
A few days later, the horse comes back, with a female horse. "Now you have two horses, and very soon a third one. You must be happy", his neighbor says. "I don't know", answers the man.
The next day, the man's son tries to care about the new horse, but the horse rebels and the son has his leg broken. "That's your only son, and know he won't be able to work or provide for you in your old days anymore. You must be sad". "I don't know", answers the man.
A few days later, this is war. All young men must leave and go to war. Since the man's son is injured, he doesn't have to go. "Your son won't have to face the horror of war. How good for both of you ! I wish my own son was still there with me".
Some versions of the story stop there, but it can keep going, and end either on a positive event or on a negative one. Basically, this is a story about how you can never know if an event will be good or bad, no matter the first impression. It cannot fit any of those story patterns.
This is addictive like crazy because we have several stories told at once, each with their own succession of rises and falls at different paces.
Of course, GP post is similarly OT.
But the original article is not especially about novels, it's about stories in general. Cinderella is mentioned in the article, as a story archetype, and although longer, it is not a novel either (and would be pretty boring as a full-length novel).
So, sure, it's not a novel, but is it a story? My point is, it's very debatable. Most people, me included, would say "I heard a story yesterday, about a poor man who bought a horse, and..." But it does not fit the usual, ultra-simplified structure of a story (a conflict, and then a resolution of the conflict).
Of cause it can, just because you have a character proclaim he doesn’t know doesn’t suddenly make it so. The curve goes down when his son breaks his leg and it goes up when he doesn’t have to join the army. There is no requirement to integrate all future development into the current state of the curve.
This counts as research?
Researchers could not find other lengths although they hypothesized that if someone wanted they could create a “mega” category. “It’s possible,” they concluded.
The same is true for film - opportunities to tell a 10 minute or 70 minute story are pretty rare, and I think techniques of film have just developed around that limitation. A 70 minute film might just leave viewers feeling confused.
70min movies can work fine - the 68 min Detour (1945), one of the first noirs, doesn't seem too short at all. Rick and Morty at 22 or so minutes does more than most 1 hour tv shows - an hour at that pace might be too much. Also, it seems that in the first decades or 50 years of cinema, plenty of 10 and 70 minute stories were shown, but recently you get the 'main feature' and nothing else.
Even revising the claim to "all novels follow these plots" is surely easy to disprove given the relatively small sample size compared to the sheer abundance of novels written, but at least it wouldn't try to assert specific literary structures on non-literary forms of storytelling (and even some (quasi)literary ones; I've encountered a lot of fanfics with Mary Sue characters who experience no change in fortune at all!).
This is an important distinction when looking at whether it's good or bad research.
However they only discovered that a variable can go up, down, or stay the same. Not exactly rocket science.
If you tracked multiple hero/protagonists then their interleavings could be uncountable.
I'd love to hear how anyone could argue that it fits any one of these.
Osborne and Harry both have riches to rags stories of varying degrees. Things get progressively worse for the both of them, but Osborne wasn't doing so great to start with.
Kate and Linda have Cinderella stories of varying degrees. They both start off thinking they're getting what they want, things get worse for most of the story, and both end up with basically what they started out trying to get in the end.
Icarus for Chad (from aspiring millionaire to dead in mere days).
Cinderella for Linda (from aspiring millionaire to everything going wrong, losing Chad, etc. to having her surgery paid in full by the CIA)
It seems a bit naive to say "every story in the world" when they analyzed only "thousands of novels" -- this doesn't even mention what languages they analyzed. I could imagine many Greek-influenced cultures (e.g. "the West") having similar archetypes by virtue of a common ancestor. Language analysis tools for CJK aren't, as far as I know, as advanced, so I can imagine a lot of stories from those languages being left out as well.
The reason I bring this up is that I'm reading a book called "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes," [1] which is about a remote tribe of people in the Amazon jungle called the Pirahã. [2]
One of the most stunning points in the book is that their culture is such that all stories told by native Pirahã are based on first-person experience. When a Pirahã dies, their stories are not passed on or retold. Due to this, there's also no need to record past stories, orally or otherwise.
This kind of study would obviously exclude stories from that kind of culture and seems a bit narrow-minded: "everything I looked at says A, so EVERYTHING must be A."
"I got up this morning and everything was fine. Mid-morning I fell out of a tree and had a hell of a time getting home. But I made it and was so happy to see my family again."
The rise/fall model is rather trivial, but your point doesn't stick.
Because they analyzed "thousands of novels." There are no Pirahã novels. The point I was trying to make is that the sample set of 1700 novels, most likely from a Western tradition, is laughably small to claim it applies to "every story in the world."
A lone melody works on one dimension also: Absolute rises and falls.. This can be pleasing but is limited in it expressiveness. Add another note however, and you get another kind of rise and fall: Relative. One note is falling, but the other note is falling faster. One note rises while the other note falls, but then later falls when the other rises.. Now add a third note, and you start to get to hint and deceive where each note will go, fulfilling and violating expectations.
Now that sounds like a real story.
Thanks text mining techniques! Here's an article saying the same thing almost word-for-word from 2004 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3632074/Everything...
First, I'm not even sure every good story can be shoehorned in the framework.
For example, how does the archetypal "vengeance story" fit in that framework?
In that type of story, many a time, the seeker of vengeance, once he's reached his goal after much struggling, finds he's destroyed himself in so doing.
Trying to apply the framework leads to the main character essentially never getting out of the hole ... you could argue that reaching the vengeance goal is a super short "high" of the story, but I find the argument specious.
Second, even if we assume that every story can somehow be shoehorned into a simple curve of highs and lows ... what does that actually teach you about the story?
More importantly, what kind of creative help does that buy you? I'm pretty sure I coud "reverse-engineer" any highs-an-lows type curve into a story rather easily ... will that make the story any kind of interesting? I doubt it.
Infant's shoes for sale. Never worn.
Apparently Ray Bradbury, when asked what science fiction is, supposed to have written:
Last man in the world heard a knock on his door.
[1] http://rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-big-list-of-r...
Moreover, the receiver's personal ties to the story and its elements (characters, settings and then the meta:translation, origin, etc.) before, during and after getting story matters as much, if not more.
There are so many more interesting, surprising stories to be told that leave the viewer with unresolved things to think about and captivating cul-de-sacs along the way. The 1970s films were full of odd, interesting plots and films where it was unclear who the protagonist was (let alone a hero). Then Lucas discovered Campbell and made two pretty-good, unbelievably successful kids' films and modern cinema was born.
Now every film (especially kids' films) are a take on a James Bond plot whether they are about loveable zoo Creatures and cheeky penguins, toys in a nursery-school or talking cars: a super-villain, a secret base, a mysterious super-weapon… yawn
Grown-up films are no better: reduced to a sorry stream of infantilised garbage about super-heros who each in turn is given super-powers only to see them quickly taken away to provide some tension before a giant battle in which cities (and budgets) are destroyed for no good reason (accept perhaps to deliver a few half-decent one-liners) before a last-minute triumphant victory in a working steel-mill (if budget allows) or some disused warehouse if not.
sigh
Insofar as there is a Hollywood formula, it's more Save the Cat than Campbell (or even the Writer's Journey), and the former does not derive from the latter.
I used to know a screen writer, and he described Hollywood writing as a theme park ride you watch on a screen. There are standard scenes that every action movie is supposed to have, usually delivered in a standard order, sometimes with standard dialog. There are optional scenes from the Generic Hollywood Scene Library Sorted By Genre that writers can add as needed. The rest is CGI, costumes, and camera moves.
And it's this way because it's what the middle of the bell curve pays for. Anything too clever or original or interesting or challenging may win awards and/or critical praise, but it's not what The Average Movie Ticket Buyer wants.
To add: the original research is pretty much useless, as others have pointed out. That doesn't mean someone who actually understands the industry couldn't codify the tropes and cliches and produce a Plot and Character Machine that generated commercially valuable output. There are quite a few steps from that to generating a filmable script, but even a relatively simple outliner that hit the spot would have real value.
I've done some work with one of the authors (Lewis, who is based at Adelaide Uni). They do some interesting work generally.
Some of these motivations are simple to understand - 'get rich', 'get recognised', 'sheer pleasure', 'because your failed author parents want you to repeat their folly' and so on. I have seen 'there are only n types of plot' stories before, I would much rather have motivations for writing novels being the categorisation as then I would be able to better identify what I did want to read, i.e. the 'banned books'.
There is a big difference between what some Eton educated aristocrat dictates to their secretary so they can be lauded in society as an 'author' to what someone in jail with no education writes to get themselves their freedom. This applies to words beyond novels too. For example the 'left wing' writings of Tony Benn (UK anti-war movement, aristocrat, dictated to secretaries) matter very little to me compared to what Malcolm X had to say.
New stories that don't necessarily fit into pigeonholes can come from real life where that period of history is a bit of a lie and the truth can't be told under any circumstances. During these times the only truth can be found in novels that transpose the names, times and places for something that the audience won't self-censor. So we end up with 'Oceania' or 'Animal Farm' with it not being clear what regime is being critiqued exactly.
Such works of fiction are written because something needs to be said, or at least the author thinks so. It is not like the author has decided 'I want to become a writer' and googled a plot from the internet to rip off. In this way literature is written, not just novels to make money with.
These aren't plots, they're highest-level structures. They're also merely all six alternations of up/down across two and three combinations.
"From bad to good fortune" or "From good to bad to good" isn't a plot.
"A young man leaves his town in search of adventure, his talent is quickly recognized by the military and he leads a platoon in battle which wins the war and he finds the meaning in his life he'd been missing" is a plot, albeit a very basic one.
/ \ /\ \/ /\/ \/\tldr:
Every story has change.
* Positive
* Negative
* Positive, then negative!
* Negative, then positive!
* Positive, then negative...then positive!
* Really negative...then positive!
if that's what you learn after studying 1700 novels, i'd give up on fiction entirely