How Predictable Is Fiction? | Hacker News Reader

How Predictable Is Fiction?

tedunderwood.com

22 pointspolm2316 comments

In junior high school, I started reading Doc Savage novels. Originally written in the 1930's, the author, Lester Dent, was originally paid $500 for writing these pulp fiction stores . Bantam Books republished these in the mid-60's.[1] There ended up being over 180 of these Doc Savage novels.

Lester Dent used an outline for these stories to ensure that they would be successful. The outline described when the hero should get in trouble, when there should be a fist-fight, etc. This detailed outline is described in "Lester Dent and the Master Fiction Plot" [2]. Even at a young age I realized the the stories were formulaic, but I enjoyed them anyway.

I broke my ankle a few years ago and ended up with an orthopedic surgeon named Dr. Savage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Doc_Savage_novels

[2] https://steegerbooks.com/lester-dent-and-the-master-fiction-...

This sparked a thought:

Do you know about https://tvtropes.org ?

Wouldn't it be cool to train a model to identify the underlying tropes of any fiction writing?

Wait, is that what Netflix does with the micro-specific genres they tag?

That blog is barely readable on my retina display. Font color #373737 font-weight 300, size 15px? Why?

Font is perfectly readable on my retinas. On mobile so I can't inspect element, but the text looks pretty much black on white. #373737 should indeed be nearly black so that seems to match. Or is it the 15px height that makes it hard for you? It seems like a normal font size to me.

It's barely readable on my 16" MBP. Tiny font with super thin lines.

Zooming in is quite easy.

#373737 is over 20% of the way to white.

It's clearly grey text, not black.

Note the unit is px, not pt, it does not scale with devicePixelRatio.

Oh, yeah if the renderer ignores that the font is specified in a format not designed for displays with resolutions smaller than anyone can see anyway, that would explain the issue.

Interesting idea, but perhaps BERT "strides" too narrowly to really detect predictability? Imprecise language is all I can muster.

But an equally intuitive argument could be made that fiction entertains readers by baffling and eluding their expectations about what, specifically, will happen next.

That's what fiction that wins literary prizes and gets emphasized by literary nerds and academia does. It is absolutely not reflective of fiction as a whole or on average.

I would say exactly the opposite : cliffhangers and cheap thrills are the stuff the Da Vinci Code, Tom Clancy novels and all your best selling page turners are made of.

Literary prize winning fiction has been what you could call post narrative since (at least) the Nouveau Roman.

It appears you're actually both on the same page, you didn't say the opposite.

He's saying the common fiction including best sellers are generally predictable. And literary novels being less so.

Not really, there is a difference of scale to consider. Best sellers are unpredictable from one page to the next, unexpected surprises abound but the general plot is highly predictable. Literary novels typically have very mundane, thoroughly predictable narratives, what is unexpected is the way in which it is delivered or the comments the narrator may make along the way.

The original author refers to fiction [which] entertains readers by baffling and eluding their expectations about what, specifically, will happen next. Which I believe is closer to the way popular fiction operates than to literary fiction.

I think there are two different questions:

Will our protagonist achieve their goal?

How will our protagonist achieve their goal?

You can be unpredictable by not knowing where the story is going, or unpredictable by not knowing how the story will go where it must go. I'm a fan of the latter (lots of genre fiction) because it's like a puzzle. I know Harry's going to thwart Voldemort again this book, but it really looks like there's no way he will, so how the hell is he going to do it?

Well, I think a lot of literature has a tendency to be read a way based on what the reader knows. So the notion of what is baffling is different depending on what you've built as an intuition for what the story is telling which depends on what other stories you've read.

Personally, I can recall having expectations eluded multiple times in East of Eden even though the narrative is actually fairly direct. It's just that the books I've read build for me the future path for where this book is going. I suspect that if I had read it as a teenager I would have had fewer moments where that occurred.

There is a beautiful space between being very predictable and providing no release to the reader. I think good writers are able to do that for the audiences they're aiming at.

Perhaps the classical authors are merely those who can do that for many.

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