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.
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!
I can't think of a specific ref off the top of my head but there are great books out there. Also, I used dialog as an example but what makes a story addictive is the act of filling in the blanks. You can do that with emotional transitions or imagery and that's what I meant by "do that throughout your book and few people will complain about a lack of plot"
Plots are a great tool in that they have that part built in.
I'm several champagnes in at this point on a transatlantic flight and we're landing but I'll go through my list of fave writing books when I get settled
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.
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.
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".
This is lampshaded in the Futurama episode "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings", when Robot Devil complains about Fry's opera, saying that "you cannot make your characters just say how they feel. That sloppy writing makes me so angry!" (Quoting from memory.)
It's just a general clear communication principle that can take many forms. If you have filler content for the sake of padding out the work, it isn't communicating anything, and the audience will know it.
Take that thought in the other direction - how to communicate more efficiently - and you end up with snappy movie dialogue and non-verbal interaction that can push a plot forward really quickly.
With any kind of communication the challenges involve a mix of both knowing what techniques are possible, and having messages worth focusing those techniques on.
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.
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.
The blog post this was based on (http://www.matthewjockers.net/2014/06/05/a-novel-method-for-...) 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.
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.
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?
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.
This is from the Tao Te Ching.
This verses teaches one to be balanced and not to be attached to outcomes because in life there are endless highs and lows.
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).
Of cause it can, just because you have a character proclaim he doesn’t know doesn’t suddenly make it so. The curve goes down when his son breaks his leg and it goes up when he doesn’t have to join the army. There is no requirement to integrate all future development into the current state of the curve.
Which one is it then? Oedipus? Cinderella? Man in the hole? That story looks like a perfect sine wave, and has no defined ending (I heard it with more or less steps). It does not fit any of those 6 predefined patterns.
Actually that's why series on TV are so addictive. They have different plots with different lengths at the same time. Typical schema: one plot episode-length (the case being solved, this week's bad guy), one plot season-length (the season's big bad guy), and one or more character plots (A and B fall in love, and then break up, and then...) that can span anywhere from a few episodes to the whole show.
This is addictive like crazy because we have several stories told at once, each with their own succession of rises and falls at different paces.
It took me a while to figure out that on HN you get downvoted if you aren't agreed with or your opinion is disliked - quite often nothing to do with any actual intellectual argument. I've learned to ignore all the downvotes that I get - they are meaningless, and usually associated with what I consider to be my more insightful posts. (Since more insight implies that more other people haven't made the same observation - thus more downvotes.)
This is a story I started writing last year, it doesn't have rises & falls, just someone reminiscing on the way to the corner store for a bag of chips
If my writing doesn't count since it's just some random page on the internet, there's Bob Dylan's Tarantula, & he's won a Nobel for literature. You'll be forced to say "Every story has one these six basic plots, where a story must have a plot, & a plot must be composed of rises & falls" since anything that would go against that gets categorized as a "sub story" or "not part of the story"
The timeline may be an infinite loop but your story still ended, with the revelation that the man is doomed to repeat his Icarus story for everytime. An author could play that as a sad or happy ending, as they like.
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.
Researchers could not find other lengths although they hypothesized that if someone wanted they could create a “mega” category. “It’s possible,” they concluded.
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.
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.
They don't choose fortune, they do sentiment analysis on the words in the text. That this might be mapped or interpreted as being the same as fortune is an interpretation. For example positive words don't necessarily mean fortune in the plot, but often a plot showing fortune will have positive words.
This is an important distinction when looking at whether it's good or bad research.
If they found that despite the fact that a story can start happy and get sad, no story had ever done so, and it actually seemed to be impossible, well that would be quite an amazing discovery.
However they only discovered that a variable can go up, down, or stay the same. Not exactly rocket science.
I'm curious if they count television as storytelling here. If so, then the whole premise is demonstrably false; your standard soap opera will go beyond the stated one or two fortune-inflections in a single episode, let alone a season, let alone a series run.
Indeed, hence the curiosity. The article (both title and content, and the original title of the HN post before it got changed for some reason) claims that every story follows one of the proposed six plots, and the lack of any discussion of non-novels betrays a narrow definition of "story" in order to justify that claim.
Even revising the claim to "all novels follow these plots" is surely easy to disprove given the relatively small sample size compared to the sheer abundance of novels written, but at least it wouldn't try to assert specific literary structures on non-literary forms of storytelling (and even some (quasi)literary ones; I've encountered a lot of fanfics with Mary Sue characters who experience no change in fortune at all!).
Any television series with a plot arc is going to have multiple stories occurring simultaneously, starting and ending asynchronously. Each of those stories will likely follow a valence arc like the ones described in the article if analyzed independently.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
"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.
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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Following this typology: Man in the hole? The "Master and Margarita" isn't that complex with respect to its basic plot. The plot doesn't tell you much about the story though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
The evolution of music in the 21st century is all about creative deviation from music theory, so I'd say your analogy isn't saying what you intended it to.
It sounds like you're talking about US movies only. There's a whole world of cinema out here. 'modern US cinema' =/= modern cinema. every US film =/= every film. Sounds obvious, but (to take one example) the majority of "Best films of the year" lists I come across online actually have only US movies, and seem oblivious that movies are made in any other country, let alone most of the good ones. 'Grown-up films' of the world, not just the USA, are thankfully not in such a sorry state as you describe. Well, the marketers/advertisers/etc that made people in the US think that 'movies' = 'US movies' did a great job.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.