Researchers analysed novels to reveal six story types
bbc.com
bbc.com
Also thumbs up for using self-organising maps. Way underappreciated idea!
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.You get the same patterns in music: https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/67945245/000016_2_.pdf
about 2/3rd in: https://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/hom_0439-4216_1988_num_28_106...
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.
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.
- 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...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces
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.
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
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...
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.
They are born, they develop, they die.
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.
1. Someone comes to town
2. Someone leaves town
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.
Even 7 isn't quite correct, technically there are loads of others but they aren't successful plots.
- 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...
Also, in general a narrative suspense/drama wouldn’t fall into this, for example “twelve angry men”.
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.
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"
Even more abstract: CONFLICT, CONFLICT, CONFLICT, …
Perhaps any story not rooted in conflicts would be horribly boring and so not re-told?
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.
(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?)
Reminds me of That's interesting! (1971) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36156400)
How about this: alternating sequences of THINGS CHANGING and THINGS NOT CHANGING.
Amateur authors and stories based on real life events can break the mold. I think that's why both can be quite popular.
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.
Among other reasons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Tell it to John Cage.
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.
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.