
Heretical Things Statistics Tell Us About Fiction - Petiver
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-surprising-things-statistics-tell-us-about-fiction
======
Animats
The movie industry, unfortunately, has this figured out. The classic guide was
"Screenplay" (1979) by Syd Field, which lays out a fairly rigid structure for
movies. Then, in 2005, Blake Snyder published "Save the Cat", which is a rigid
guide to what has to happen in each set of pages in a screenplay. Here's the
summary on one page.[1]

This pattern is so effective that almost every big-budget movie from Hollywood
now follows it. Very closely.[2] So closely that audiences expect it.
Hollywood got a design pattern that works, and they're sticking with it.

[1] [https://goodinaroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Blake-
Sny...](https://goodinaroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Blake-Snyders-Beat-
Sheet.pdf) [2] [http://www.savethecat.com/beat-sheets-
alpha](http://www.savethecat.com/beat-sheets-alpha)

~~~
grantsch
As someone with some relevant industry experience, I can tell you that nearly
0 professional screenwriters or development executives are consciously
sticking to a rigid structure as prescribed by some book. Instead, what you're
seeing is the difference between after the fact analysis and the process of
creation. Things like the three act structure and certain beats appearing in
many movies exist because those are just natural ways to tell a story. The
three act structure is, at the most basic level, just the series of beginning,
middle, and end. Of course any movie has these sections by necessity and there
are better and worse ways to navigate through each.

Just to be clear though, _no one_ is sitting around talking about Snyder's
beats or terminology. In the industry, the only terms you'll here from these
books are discussions of the three act structure because that is so vital to
this sort of material. All that said, I do think the books are a good starting
point for someone who wants to think critically about story, but don't think
that these are blueprints for Hollywood success. If they were, every
screenwriter would be paid scale.

~~~
jessaustin
To someone outside the industry, the idea that much Hollywood screenwriting
follows a rigid formula seems plausible. There may be creative auteurs
creating bizarre plots with delightfully unpredictable pacing, but those
scripts aren't being filmed and distributed to the public.

~~~
Boothroid
Indeed, it's getting to the point now where all TV/movies seem to be using the
same tricks around pacing, creating audience involvement with characters,
generating tension etc., to the point where I recognise it easily and then
cannot continue watching. In contrast, and obviously I'm generalising
massively but still, I find that older media doesn't seem quite so desperate
to build me up into a frenzy of emotion, and seems happier to let a story
develop at its own pace without resorting to shallow tricks to liven things
up.

------
sverige
Applying statistics to works of fiction is mildly interesting, much as
applying geometry to paintings. But after you tell me all about your
statistical analysis of Faulkner's prose or how the Golden Mean is distorted
in Van Gogh's paintings, you still haven't touched the thing that makes the
works of Faulkner and Van Gogh much more interesting than those of their less-
known contemporaries. That's why it is called "art" and not "science."

~~~
whatshisface
I've always wanted to conduct an experiment where we put some higshcoolers who
wanted to major in art history in isolation (except for sterilized food and
some math textbooks slipped under the door) and had them reconstruct the
periods and choose important artists from scratch.

How much of the canon would turn out the same?

~~~
bbctol
Similar to the plot of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote)

~~~
ivanbakel
I wouldn't agree. Menard is about authorship of a rewritten identical work -
the GP was talking about people selecting works to potentially produce a
different canon, and there's no question of an author.

~~~
bbctol
Right... but it's similar.

------
seniorsassycat
On authors favorite words: "The words must be used in half an author’s books,
at least once per hundred thousand words; they can’t be proper nouns... Isaac
Asimov prefers 'terminus,'"

"terminus" is the proper name of a location in Asimov's Foundation series. Did
Ben Blatt's analysis fail to account for common words used as proper nouns, or
does Asimov use terminus outside the Foundation series?

~~~
__s
Apparently the word has to appear in half their books. I don't know if he took
the whole of Asimov's 900+ books

~~~
ashark
Wikipedia puts him at 40 novels, enough short stories for _maybe_ 40 short to
mid-sized collections (382 stories), 280 non-fic books, and 146 as editor or
annotator, which surely don't count. 504 books included edited/annotated. If
one were only using fiction and excluding duplicates (I'm sure there were
collections of short stories of his which were mostly or entirely repeats from
earlier collections) then that's maybe 80 volumes of unique material (I'm sure
there were tons of dupes in various story collections), tops. They'd easily
fit in 40-50 fairly ordinary vols. I bet if you were willing to put multiple
"books" in one (a lot of his juvenilia are really short) and probably 10-15
LOA-style volumes.

Not that that's a small amount of fiction to have written, but even including
the non-fic it's nowhere near 900.

~~~
__s
Yes, seems my off-the-cuff memory's is counting an individual short story as a
book & even then doubled the value

[http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html](http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html)

------
sn9
I'm curious to see how someone like Neal Stephenson would be identified. His
writing style seems to change to fit the times and persons he writes about.

------
EpsilonWrangler
I don't know if this was taken into account, but in Isaac Asimov's Foundation
series, "terminus" was very much a proper noun, being the name of the very
planet where most of the plot takes place.

I wonder if he named it that because he liked the word so much, or if the word
became his "favourite" after using it that way? It would be cool to see how
author's usages of these words changed over time.

