1. Rags to riches: RISE
2. Riches to rags: FALL
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3. Icarus: RISE, FALL
6. Man in a hole: FALL, RISE
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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"
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Tell it to John Cage.