
Researchers analysed 1700 novels to reveal six story types - sdeepak
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180525-every-story-in-the-world-has-one-of-these-six-basic-plots
======
weeksie
Plot structures are tools. All else being equal it's a good idea to pick a
plot that's as simple as possible and hang the interesting stuff off that. The
classic mistake of beginning writers is to go for complexity in plot and then
spend their entire time serving that plot to the detriment of their
characters.

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.

~~~
jacobkg
Can you give reference(s) for that beginner’s mistake? I’ve never heard it
before and it’s definitely something I do. Would love to learn more about
this!

~~~
thrusong
In journalism/media school, we're taught "show, don't tell" in both our news
and creative writing courses. You want to use detail to set the
atmosphere/tone without flat out saying it.

~~~
jpfed
I have heard that this advice is given for news, and I think that this is
unfortunate.

"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.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I don't know - Show politician X is a liar instead of tell that politician X
is a liar might be good advice.

~~~
jpfed
It depends on how obvious the lie is. If someone says "The earth is both flat
and made of cheese", they are so obviously wrong that you could afford to just
rely on the reader's common sense. But if they say "the economy grew by Y
percent for the first time in Z years", it's unlikely the reader has the facts
necessary to recognize this as a lie immediately on hand.

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".

------
rayalez
There are dozens of writing mentors/gurus, and every one of them has
discovered _the_ story structure, or _the_ 3/7/10/50 basic plots. All of them
are different. From vague and meaningless "beginning-middle-end but not always
in the same order" to Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet or Dan Harmon's story
circle(Campbell's hero's journey).

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.

~~~
CuriouslyC
You misunderstood the research in the article. They aren't saying that there
are only 6 plots, rather that there are 6 basic progressions of valence (i.e.
mood of the story) that almost all stories are minor variations of. There are
of course variations that are outliers, and the way in which these valence
transitions occur differs from story to story, but the emotional "ride" these
progressions create should be very similar.

------
falien
The blog post this was based on
([http://www.matthewjockers.net/2014/06/05/a-novel-method-
for-...](http://www.matthewjockers.net/2014/06/05/a-novel-method-for-
detecting-plot/)) which is from 2014 was widely panned when it was first
publicized, and some of the many problems with the methodology pointed out by
scholars with more experience and competence with the statistical methods
involved. That's how scholarship is supposed to work. However, it will never
stop media from seizing on a great click-baity headline.

------
apo
In the early-90's I saw Vonnegut give a presentation in which he talked about
his story graph idea.

However, the video linked to in the article appears to end before the most
interesting part.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-84vuR1f90](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:

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25455700-the-story-
grid](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25455700-the-story-grid)

~~~
stepvhen
Pretty sure most folk in Hamlet get a bad deal in the end, and Hamlet's
brooding and whining doesnt outweigh that. Ophelia literally goes mad and is
driven to arguable suicide. Everyone that mattered dies, and if that is
outweighed by Fortinbras and his good fortune in the end. Hamlet is Icarus if
anything, since it only goes well for him for a moment while everybody else is
on a downward spiral.

------
mrob
Counterexample:

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?

~~~
sacado2
There's a traditional variant of this schema:

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.

~~~
jessaustin
This is a parable, not a novel. It's hard to imagine expanding this narrative
to anything novel-length and also readable, so it's unrelated to TFA.

Of course, GP post is similarly OT.

~~~
sacado2
This is not a novel, but it's a traditional oral tale (from Tao Tö King
apparently). I've heard it several times from different storytellers. It
usually lasts about 2-3 mins, no more.

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).

------
busterarm
This feels pretty reductive. They chose one variable to measure stories on,
fortune, and then of course all of these stories follow a short list of
possible patterns.

This counts as research?

~~~
ummonk
What they should research next: "every story falls into one of these basic
length categories!"

~~~
projectramo
Short, medium and long.

Researchers could not find other lengths although they hypothesized that if
someone wanted they could create a “mega” category. “It’s possible,” they
concluded.

~~~
lozenge
Funnily, book and story lengths actually do bunch up for commercial reasons. I
read of one author whose kids book was semi accepted, but they needed another
80 pages to hit the next price point. (Basically, the unusually thin book
would not "communicate value" on the shelf). Extending the story ruined the
flow, so he decided to self publish online.

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.

~~~
yesenadam
It's interesting how in filmed stories there are the 2 main types - _movie_
and _tv series_ , where the shorter _movie_ seems the more
serious/central/important/prestigious etc form, the opposite of the situation
with _short story /novella_ vs _novel_. That's just from the historical
accident of people seeing movies in cinemas, and series on TV, I guess.

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.

------
hprotagonist
I wonder if I can construct a Cantor-like diagonal proof that creates a
definitively non-countable plot.

~~~
tlb
Here, the only tokens are _rise_ and _fall_ and they must alternate. So you
can enumerate plots by picking a starting token and a number of alternations.
Thus there are Aleph_0 plots.

If you tracked multiple hero/protagonists then their interleavings could be
uncountable.

~~~
manwe150
Is it required that “rise” and “fall” be boolean/digital operations? I think
it would be more reasonable to characterize them as analog/continuous. That
could then lead to infinite variations in rates, even just with a single
character. And that’s before considering whether the characters and reader are
correct in determining their current trajectory—much as in real life.

------
sambeau
My kids & I watched the Coen Brothers, "Burn After Reading" last night.

I'd love to hear how anyone could argue that it fits any one of these.

~~~
qbrass
It's multiple stories driven by the same set of events.

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.

------
sdrothrock
> Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Professor
> Matthew Jockers at Washington State University, and later researchers at the
> University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, analysed data from
> thousands of novels to reveal six basic story types

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."

[1]
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307386120](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307386120)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3)

~~~
robotresearcher
Why would it exclude Pirahã stories?

"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.

~~~
sdrothrock
> Why would it exclude Pirahã stories?

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."

------
stewbrew
Or maybe, every story has one of this one basic plot: (1)
setup/intro/beginning, (2) stuff happens, (3) things somehow come to an end
(for now).

~~~
sacado2
Not sure you even need the first part. A character has a problem and tries to
solve it, until he either succeeds or definitely fails. Lots of stories start
with a conflict at the very first line, without any kind of setup (especially
thrillers).

~~~
hexane360
(1) stuff happens

~~~
sacado2
You still need a resolution, though. (1) conflict (2) either conflict is
solved or it is definitely unsolved.

------
SubiculumCode
Even if we were to allow that the story can be described on one dimension over
time: Real stories do not have one arc.

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.

------
gaius
_Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done_

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...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3632074/Everything-
ever-written-boiled-down-to-seven-plots.html)

~~~
shakethemonkey
And then there's TV Tropes[1] which uses a finer measure

[1]
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Plots](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Plots)

------
Ptyx
What about Waiting for Godot? The play in which nothing happens, two times.

------
ur-whale
I'm not sure I'm buying the theory laid out in this article, for at least two
reasons.

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.

------
SubiculumCode
If you reduce to 1 axis all plots then yes all changes are on that axis.

------
simtam
Every time I see such a list on the internet, I ask myself "So, now, which of
those basic plots is 'Master and Margarita'?", which leads to a conclusion
that these lists bear a negligible amount of cognitive value.

~~~
vntok
"Master and Margarita" seem to follow the BBC post's Oedipus storyline: Fall
(rejection of the Master's novel, his desperation, separation from Margarita
and internment into a psychiatric hospital), Rise (Margarita's offer from
Satan brings her power over the elements, the Master finally gets out of
prison and the couple gets back together) & Fall again when they are poisoned
and die in disgrace both from Satan and God.

------
somberi
Hemmingway, when challenged that simple words and short sentences do not work
well, wrote:

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.

------
whydoineedthis
Wasn't this already well known from Kurt Vonnegut lectures?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ)

~~~
thinkingemote
As indeed the first and second paragraph states

------
hiisukun
This reminds me strongly of a blog post [1] I read recently (probably on HN!)
that listed an abstract form for 'all' the RPG plots. The list is
unfortunately much than the six given in the bbc article, but the feeling I
got from reading it is the same.

[1] [http://rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-big-list-
of-r...](http://rolltop-indigo.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-big-list-of-rpg-
plots.html)

------
johnchristopher
I am of the opinion that the plot doesn't matter as much as the context into
which the story is being told: who are you telling the story to and why ?
Which view of the world are you conveying at that moment ? Why tell that
particular story now and to which audience ?

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.

------
vichu
A great book on this subject is Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand
Faces. His theory of the archetypal hero and the theory of the monomyth is a
great influence on anlyses like this one (and also on some artistic works -
including a small film series known as Star Wars). It's fantastic to see these
natural language processing techniques applied to this topic.

~~~
sambeau
I blame Joseph Campbell for ruining modern cinema with it's simplistic boring
plots (like Star Wars's) where yet another hero battles some evil tyrant to
save the world, universe or forest.

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_

~~~
nprateem
Agreed. Hollywood wanted a formula and found one in Campbell. After reading
that book or others about the "hero's journey" most mainstream films are quite
bland. Having said that, there are only 7 notes in the major scale and look
what that's done for us...

~~~
dragonwriter
> Hollywood wanted a formula and found one in Campbell.

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.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Campbell has been more of an influence on genre fiction than Hollywood. Genre
writers obsess about characterisation in a way that screen writers - at least
the ones who get regular work - clearly don't.

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.

------
mtVessel
Aristotle came to the same conclusions somewhat earlier, using only natural
intelligence and manual learning techniques.

------
nl
This is the paper if anyone is interested:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07772](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.07772)

I've done some work with one of the authors (Lewis, who is based at Adelaide
Uni). They do some interesting work generally.

------
jVinc
I'd love to see someone drawing out the graph for A song of fire and Ice. Not
only do you have several simultansus character arcs to draw out, but through
the story arch they are also discontinuous and mix between being interwoven
and separate in quite interesting fashions.

------
amp108
Ignore everything that makes stories different from each other, only look at
the beginning and the end states, and hey-presto, you can reduce every story
to one of six types.

------
madcaptenor
So if you figure that stories are composed of rises and falls, and they have
to alternate, don’t you get this result automatically?

------
smithmayowa
What about fall to fall tales and rise to rise tales that abound plenty-full
in several cultures like mine.

~~~
acbart
Trivially reducible to the concatenation of a Rise-to-rag and a Rags-to-rise
tales! Clearly nothing new there.

------
keiferski
Kafka doesn’t seem to fit these plots. Most of his work is about conveying a
mood or feeling.

------
Theodores
I think people's motivations for writing fiction - novels - could be reduced
to six.

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.

------
crazygringo
This abuses the word "plot".

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.

~~~
nwellnhof
Right, the six "structures" they found are:

    
    
        /  \  /\  \/  /\/  \/\

------
blueboo
lol!

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

