“Stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper”
November 11, 2023 1:43 AM Subscribe

Do sentiment analysis on all the words in a novel, poem or play and plot the results against time, and it’s possible to see how the mood changes over the course of the text, revealing a kind of emotional narrative. While not a perfect tool – it looks at words in isolation, ignoring context – it can be surprisingly insightful when applied to larger chunks of text... from Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots [BBC]

The plots, as plotted:
1. Rags to riches – a steady rise from bad to good fortune
2. Riches to rags – a fall from good to bad, a tragedy
3. Icarus – a rise then a fall in fortune
4. Oedipus – a fall, a rise then a fall again
5. Cinderella – rise, fall, rise
6. Man in a hole – fall, rise

posted by chavenet (95 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite

I think Chumbawamba perfected #6, at least in terms of economy.
posted by condour75 at 2:13 AM on November 11, 2023 [46 favorites]

Mulholland Drive?
posted by Grangousier at 2:16 AM on November 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

I miss Kurt Vonnegut.
posted by kram175 at 3:00 AM on November 11, 2023 [25 favorites]

The BBC headline says: "every story in the *world*".

Clicking through to the article: "1700 *English* novels".

Imagine seeing a study done on English novels and thinking that this generalised to "every story in the world".
posted by surenoproblem at 3:08 AM on November 11, 2023 [58 favorites]

So the claim here is that fortunes in stories don't remain stationary and don't change direction more than twice?
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 3:41 AM on November 11, 2023 [15 favorites]

This is actually nifty, but the cynic in me wants to scream "Propp already did this, without a computer".
posted by hoyland at 3:50 AM on November 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

(Yes, I am aware Propp is actually doing something different -- his units don't occur in a particular order.)
posted by hoyland at 3:51 AM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure I'd call "things going great" vs "things going terrible" synonymous with "plot."
posted by rikschell at 4:17 AM on November 11, 2023 [13 favorites]

6. Man in a hole – fall, rise

...and of course its beloved companion piece: Hole in a Man - rise, fall
posted by fairmettle at 4:18 AM on November 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Or indeed that classic of sexual dysfunction, “The Hole in the Bed” by Mr. Completely
posted by chavenet at 4:24 AM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have enlisted a cluster of supercomputers to distill the essence of all human narrative, and after 8 years and 59.7 finkleflops of processing, the answer can finally be revealed: things happen.
posted by grumpybear69 at 4:35 AM on November 11, 2023 [23 favorites]

The fact that things happen in stories and sometimes the things are good and other times not so good is hardly a stunning insight.

And deciding that there are "six basic plots" is super arbitrary. From the same data you could decide there are sixty-four.
posted by signal at 4:39 AM on November 11, 2023 [16 favorites]

I don't buy it.

Even their canonical examples are often a stretch. The Ugly Duckling doesn't actually fit their chart at all so they punt and call it a seventh plot they just term "complex"? How weak is your chart when a short story doesn't even fit?

Is the creature's story in Frankenstein a "rise in fortune"? For who? Did the protagonist switch in the middle, then? And you could say it did, sure, but then is any rise in fortune for anyone in the story enough to put you there on this chart? (And based on their methodology, apparently it is, because there would be "positive words".) But does that tell you anything about the story?

Where does House of Leaves fit on these charts? The Tale of Genji? A Visit from the Goon Squad? The Unnameable? Tristram Shandy? 253? Invisible Cities?

All that aside, how useful is a method of analyzing plots which boils down to, "sometimes, in stories, things happen to the characters, which are either positive or negative"?
posted by kyrademon at 4:40 AM on November 11, 2023 [28 favorites]

This reminded me of the Prosecraft debacle.
posted by signal at 4:42 AM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

The reason the Ugly Duckling doesn’t fit is that they don’t understand the Ugly Duckling. When everyone realizes the duckling is a swan, the other animals aren’t ashamed of their bigotry; they are terrified that they spent a year mocking a being known for spite and violence. Now the swan is grown, they and their families are doomed to be beaten, bitten, and drown; they are facing their own terrible and final demise. Whether that is an up beat or a down beat depends on whether you are a swan.

Also, Frankenstein going to his doom is a loss for Frankenstein, but a win for pretty much everyone else; how is that a “fall?”
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:52 AM on November 11, 2023 [26 favorites]

Note also Harvet Ismuth's 42 Essential 3rd Act Twists.
posted by mhoye at 4:54 AM on November 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

It was a fascinating read, though the note above about lack of diversity in writers is important. An interesting example of using one dimension to quantitatively analyze creative writing. Using many more variables than just 1-D ‘sentiment’ is probably important. It would be interesting to even just see two on a surface plot. I wonder what the best second quality would be in story arcs. Interconnections between characters? Tangledness?
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 4:56 AM on November 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, Seven Basic Plots?

Ted: Yeah, sure, Seven Basic Plots. Yeah, that big book of Jungian analysis of stories. Christopher Booker said he'd worked on it since the early seventies.

Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: Six... Basic... Plots... If you're not happy with the first six plots, we're gonna send you the extra plot free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".

Ted: That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with Five Basic Plots. Then you're in trouble, huh?

posted by urbanwhaleshark at 5:09 AM on November 11, 2023 [16 favorites]

Ah, contemporary* data science: all the world boiled down to m clusters plus a bucket for 'edge case' items.

*: I dunno, this might just be contemporary for noobs.
posted by k3ninho at 5:22 AM on November 11, 2023 [8 favorites]

Today is Vonnegut’s birthday, too.
posted by glaucon at 5:27 AM on November 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

I can’t decide whether this is “get of my lawn” sentiment, but this just feels to me like disciplinary contempt.
posted by umbú at 5:32 AM on November 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Ah, sentiment analysis, what a grand tool! Take this sentence: "Happy? How can I be happy? How will anyone ever be happy again, after what happened?" See? Three happies means a very positive sentence!
posted by mittens at 5:43 AM on November 11, 2023 [14 favorites]

This might involve identifying with just one character. Fortunes can vary among the characters.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:50 AM on November 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

7. Man getting hit by football
posted by Phanx at 5:57 AM on November 11, 2023 [15 favorites]

Waiting for them to plot "En attendant Godot".
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:07 AM on November 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

You know, stuff like this hits differently these days. In a world where the arts are under intense attack by the forces of capital and tech, where corporations and techbros seem to be trying to replace writers and actors and visual artists with blackbox algorithms and "AI." Where humanities programs are being gutted or just killed at universities. Where massive corporate monopolies routinely make changes to tech platforms that may destroy beloved magazines.

Like, in the past, I would have found claims like this to be annoying, possibly slightly interesting but ultimately shallow and misguided.

But now? Now it hits me in the fight or flight. Now I wanna be like, hey STEM people, maybe don't try to make yet another aspect of making and interpreting art into something automated and inhuman? Maybe not everything is best solved through quantitative means? Maybe not everything should be fed to the maw of reductive thinking and "statistical analysis"? Maybe read the room and stay in your damn lane?
posted by overglow at 6:24 AM on November 11, 2023 [26 favorites]

Definitely missing "fucking with the audience" trope
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:43 AM on November 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

8. Ow! My balls!
posted by glonous keming at 6:50 AM on November 11, 2023 [12 favorites]

This is yet another case of the headline contradicting the article. The last example in the article is The Ugly Duckling, which is labelled as "complex", which is not one of the six categories.

The subheading "Researchers analysed over 1700 novels to reveal six story types – but can they be applied to our most-loved tales?" is a question, and as per Betteridge's law of headlines, the answer is "no". But the headline itself is something else. It is not a question, but a statement, and the statement is false, and that it is false is demonstrated by the very article it is attached to!

As I understand it, headlines are usually written by the editor, not the author, which is something that doesn't seem to be widely known. There is a hazard when the editor is ostensibly the person ultimately responsible while always publishing the article with someone else's name attached to it. Regardless of who writes what, if journalism is to be considered a serious profession with professional standards, those standards have to not completely suck. Casually publishing falsehoods in large bold print is extremely not okay.
posted by swr at 7:07 AM on November 11, 2023 [13 favorites]

“Stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper”

NAPOLEON DYNAMITE's shape looks remarkably like a liger.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 7:31 AM on November 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

But are plots differentiable? How many second-order plots are there? Can you have plot discontinuities? Does the plot have values for all points along the text or can it have, heaven forbid, "holes"?

(In the background, Cantor goes slowly mad trying to graph Cortazar's Hopscotch)
posted by phooky at 7:41 AM on November 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

Thinking about overglow's point--and thinking about how for corporations, the usefulness of a given measurement tool is less important than whether VPs think it's useful--I started picturing a publisher's slush-pile being replaced with an algorithm. Dump the book into the computer--happy endings are big this season, so reject any book whose last chapter has happiness < 0.1.

The article mentions that sentiment analysis tools are freely available, and so I thought it might be interesting to look at something whose sentiment we're all pretty familiar with--in this case, Yeats' The Second Coming. The poem comes in two stanzas, and we can analyze the sentiments in each separately to get a sense of the plot.

First Tool: First stanza, negative at -0.49 with a magnitude of 0.68. Negative, but not like, a numerical ton of negativity. Second stanza, negative at -0.59 with a magnitude of 2.93. Yeah, things were bad and they got worse. Hey, that seems right? This analysis must have something going for it! Let's try another tool!

Second Tool: The first stanza of the poem is negative, with a confidence of 90.6%. The second is positive, with a confidence of 52.2%. Thus, the poem is similar to a 'rags-to-riches' story--or maybe, given the confidence level, 'rags-to-middle-class': Things start bad, but they can always get a little better! Thanks, Yeats, for the pat on the shoulder!

Third Tool: First stanza, -100 sentiment! Woo, bad start! Second stanza? An amazing increase to 86.2! Just when things look their worst, remember, it's always darkest before the dawn! There's a new day coming! Yeats: The poetic equivalent of the 'hang in there!' kitten.
posted by mittens at 7:45 AM on November 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

9. dog is counterintuitively proficient at youth sports
posted by glonous keming at 8:11 AM on November 11, 2023 [28 favorites]

Okay, so coming at this as someone who reads as much Story Theory as I can get in front of me, and sometimes gives talks on the subject as well, this is kind of hilarious, because the "discovery" here is both very, very 101-level stuff, and the article also appears to misunderstand it. But, like, misunderstand it from such a place of Engineer's Disease that there's no point.

You'll see graphs like these all over many if not most books on story theory, because they're useful as a baseline for understanding dramatic structure. But also, as Robert McKee makes the point pretty explicitly, scenes themselves run on positive and negative charges, or else the scene is inert and the audience is bored. Fortunes are constantly rising and falling in a story, making this sort of graph pretty arbitrary except in the broadest terms (and we can see the arbitrariness in, say, starting "The Ugly Duckling" off before the protagonist hatches. We all know the basic shape of that story: Bird hatches, is deemed ugly and ostracized, grows into a beautiful swan. That's "man in a hole" based on their definitions, but whatever.)

The other big thing this misses is irony, which is basically like this article saying it's developed a comprehensive understanding of music based on melody without any reference to harmony. Irony (in this context) is when there are multiple values playing at once, often opposed to one another. In Romeo & Juliet, for instance, the deaths of the protagonists are definitely tragic, but also impel Verona towards peace. King Lear and Cordelia die, but Lear dies finally understanding Cordelia's love for him. MacBeth is barely king before he's vanquished, but there's both justice and sorrow in that. And to bring it into more modern times, I'm not going to spoil the end of Loki for those who haven't seen it yet, but it's more powerful than it really has any right to be because it expertly plays on opposing values to create a deeply ironic ending.

So in order to do this, you have to pick basically one value, and then battle against a coastline paradox of sorts in order to make it fit one of these six models. This isn't a worthless exercise, to be sure, but it's the beginning of studying this sort of thing, rather than a conclusion to it.
posted by Navelgazer at 8:23 AM on November 11, 2023 [14 favorites]

It seems kind of tautologically true? If you characterize the sentiment as either rising or falling, and group sentiments of the same "sign" together (so rising + rising = rising), and limit your analysis to the 3 biggest sentiment changes (e.g., ignore the fact that the ugly duckling graph actually shows rising, falling, rising, falling, rising) then there are only six permutations:

1. +
2. -
3. + -
4. - +
5. + - +
6. - + -

Which is the same as their list in a different order.
posted by justkevin at 8:55 AM on November 11, 2023 [18 favorites]

Now do My Dinner With André
posted by kinnakeet at 9:09 AM on November 11, 2023 [8 favorites]

Didn’t Northrop Frye essentially do this already in 1957?
posted by en forme de poire at 9:09 AM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Using many more variables than just 1-D ‘sentiment’ is probably important.

For some time, psychology research has characterized emotion in various two-dimensional schemes (for example, "energy" and "valence", with things like "rage" and "panic" being high-energy and negative valence, "euphoria" and "exuberance" being high-energy and positive valence, "depression" being low-energy and negative valence, "contentment" being low-energy and positive valence), with the understanding that there are other axes of variation that crinkle up the 2D map a bit (states of anger, fear, and anxiety, for example, could all have similar energy and valence, but they have crucial differences, both qualitatively and in physiologically measurable ways). There's a data set floating out there with 19 measured dimensions that I'd love to crunch a lower-dimensional manifold out of.

Rather than one word at a time, I think I would prefer to perform sentiment analysis on a sliding window of text, and have at least two output dimensions* at any moment in time, so that the stacked moments of time would be trace out a winding curve in space. That would at least look cool.

*It might be even better to represent the emotion of a window of text as a 2D point cloud or distribution, because mixed emotions are a thing. Then the curve would have thickness, spreading or thinning as the emotions became more ambiguous or clear.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 9:26 AM on November 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

Scrooge McDuck, Little Richie Rich. Riches to riches.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:37 AM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

1. A dream
2. A dream within a dream
3. A dream within a dream within a dream
4. A dream within a dream within a dream within a dream
5. A dream within a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream
6. A nightmare
posted by dng at 9:44 AM on November 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots [BBC]

Fuck Off Scientism.

I tried to find a more polite way of conveying my feeling about this sort of technocratic bullshit but sometimes less is more. Full reveal: I've spent way too much of my life in the screenplay world where slowly over time, a rather large and sloppy industry has evolved wherein The Screenplay can be broken down into a sort of machine logic thing into which various raw (sometimes even pure) ingredients are processed toward a product that conforms with existing market and/or societal demands, with actual art (whatever that yucky stuff even is) fully extracted ...

aka - hey, scientifically minded types, you know that feeling you get when some smug woo-merchant starts picking and choosing your words and concepts toward presenting their bullshit snake oil product and/or service as somehow legit. Yeah, that's how a lot of this reductive crap feels to this artistically minded type.
posted by philip-random at 9:59 AM on November 11, 2023 [8 favorites]

Everyone knows there are only 3 plots: man against man, man against nature, and man against himself. On the other hand, Kurt Vonnegut, as mentioned above.
posted by TedW at 10:14 AM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

So does this apply to movies and other narrative forms in addition to novels?
posted by TedW at 10:31 AM on November 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Trading Places. It has rags to riches and riches to rags to riches.
posted by user92371 at 10:39 AM on November 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

philip-random, this actually makes my scientific mind itchy and annoyed on scientific grounds. Several times over! As mittens points out, they didn’t need the data if their analysis can only provide those six answers; as a bunch of people pointed out, were they only using anglophone stories?; and most importantly, what does this predict or explain? What are they observing, if there isn’t an experiment?
posted by clew at 11:02 AM on November 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

Imagine seeing a study done on English novels and thinking that this generalised to "every story in the world".

Let me introduce you to England...
posted by doctornemo at 11:32 AM on November 11, 2023 [13 favorites]

10. ...timing!
posted by Mayor West at 11:32 AM on November 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

The Thirty-Six Dramatic situations

Did they just take the square root of drama?
posted by chromecow at 11:37 AM on November 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

This is only one dimension of a story. If the story you're trying to tell isn't working, then it's worth looking at it in this dimension and seeing if it makes sense in this dimension. You can look at this dimension at different resolutions, too - this article is mostly breaking it down around the resolution of "one act of 3-5" but you can look at how the fortunes of the protagonist rise and fall after every scene, too. You can also look at it on the level of "one book of several" or "one season" or... whatever. Where do you break up the three trilogies that now make up Star Wars? Where do you break up the eleven volumes of Wheel of Time?

Robin Laws' Beating the Story is a great book that starts with this dimension, and adds on several other important dimensions.
posted by egypturnash at 11:48 AM on November 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

::Joseph Campbell kicks the door in::

WRONG!

ALL STORIES ARE A CIRCLE CALLED THE MONOMYTH AND I'MMA TELL YOU WHY!

ALSO ANY STORIES THAT ARENT MONOMYTHS DON'T COUNT!
posted by Faintdreams at 11:48 AM on November 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

Please note, I, personally, do not subscribe to the Monomyth nor the Heroes journey theory.

Much like the BBC list, it is reductive, geographically restrictive *at best* and more importantly - incorrect on many axis.

Thank you.
posted by Faintdreams at 11:50 AM on November 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Trading Places. It has rags to riches and riches to rags to riches.

Don't forget the Duke brothers' riches to rags story!
posted by achrise at 11:50 AM on November 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

I subscribe to the hero's journey: down my esophagus, into my stomach, and eventually my intestine. (The grinder's journey is invalid.)
posted by phooky at 11:58 AM on November 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

METAFILTER: it is reductive, geographically restrictive *at best* and more importantly - incorrect on many axis.
posted by philip-random at 11:58 AM on November 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

But have they analyzed the oeuvre of Chuck Tingle?
posted by Hairy Lobster at 12:45 PM on November 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

The other big thing this misses is irony, which is basically like this article saying it's developed a comprehensive understanding of music based on melody without any reference to harmony.

I think it's like developing a comprehensive understanding of music based on notes without any reference to melody or harmony or time.

Also, this and all other oversimplified, technocratic reductions of story to a simple, one-dimensional structure are almost always very Euro- and Anglo-centric (even when they pretend to take into account 'Universal' literature) and sexist and colonialist. For instance, they forget this story:

11- Surviving.
posted by signal at 12:47 PM on November 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Do Infinite Jest next.
posted by quillbreaker at 1:28 PM on November 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Rereading the article in a kinder temper, and echoing things Navelgazer and egypturnash &c said:

What this is looking at is neither art nor science, but it is technique, which both need.
posted by clew at 1:35 PM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Ticket That Exploded and other Burroughs cut-up novels are just rags to rags, but with all the pages cut into quarters and combined with other pages to create novel juxtapositions. It really does work!
posted by snofoam at 1:35 PM on November 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

METAFILTER: incorrect on many ~~axis~~ axes. FTFY
posted by snofoam at 1:39 PM on November 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

I have enlisted a cluster of supercomputers to distill the essence of all human narrative, and after 8 years and 59.7 finkleflops of processing, the answer can finally be revealed: things happen.

except when they don't
posted by aspo at 1:54 PM on November 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Also, Frankenstein going to his doom is a loss for Frankenstein, but a win for pretty much everyone else; how is that a “fall?”

Well, I mean, I'm a bit confused about this comment here. Victor Frankenstein, in the novel, dies after pursuing The Creature across Asia to basically the North Pole, suffering from exposure. The Creature itself is found mourning over Victor's body and then sets himself loose onto an ice floe vowing to burn himself rather than come back to civilization.

It's really a very sad ending to a very tragic story.

I mean, maybe you're referring to the films, but I think this article specifically talks about analyzing novels.
posted by hippybear at 2:17 PM on November 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Frankenstein is such an awful person, and such an abject failure as a scientist and father, is his death any kind of tragedy?
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:21 PM on November 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

But the Creature... Yeah, anyway.
posted by hippybear at 2:24 PM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I guess this categorization doesn't account for whether you're rooting for their fall.
posted by RobotHero at 2:26 PM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

12. Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck.
posted by delfin at 2:45 PM on November 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Y'all have gotten away from what they actually did. Nobody scored how Victor Frankenstein nor his Monster were doing during the course of the novel. The just made a chart of "sentiment" of the words over story progression. emphasis mine

The researchers used sentiment analysis to get the data – a statistical technique ... in which each word is allocated a particular ‘sentiment score’, based on crowdsourced data.

Do sentiment analysis on all the words in a novel, poem or play and plot the results against time, and it’s possible to see how the mood changes over the course of the text, revealing a kind of emotional narrative. While not a perfect tool – it looks at words in isolation, ignoring context – it can be surprisingly insightful when applied to larger chunks of text, as this blog post on Jane Austen novels from data scientist Julia Silge shows.

posted by achrise at 2:55 PM on November 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Just tried this in a free online sentiment analysis tool:

"But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

It says it's positive (+0.57) Magnitude: 2.22
posted by RobotHero at 3:14 PM on November 11, 2023 [9 favorites]

But have they analyzed the oeuvre of Chuck Tingle?

I was waiting for this. It seems like there's clearly at least one additional form of plot where everything is nice and there's no rise nor fall as illustrated in the masterpiece "Pounded in the Butt By My Own Butt".

Granted I have not actually read this book, but what could possibly go wrong?
posted by loquacious at 3:25 PM on November 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

But have they analyzed the oeuvre of Chuck Tingle?

I see what you did there.
posted by chavenet at 3:30 PM on November 11, 2023 [9 favorites]

> Just tried this in a free online sentiment analysis tool

i put this thread up to that comment in two different ones. one said it was

Positive, 60.3% confidence

and the other said

This text has a sentiment score of -2.3. This means that the overall sentiment or tone of this text is essentially neutral.

posted by glonous keming at 3:30 PM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

also

13. Oldboy
posted by glonous keming at 3:31 PM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Every statement is true, if you unfocus your eyes enough.
posted by JHarris at 4:36 PM on November 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Sounds very much like the system for measuring the value of a poem that Robin Williams' character had his students tear it off their textbooks at the start of Dead Poet's Society.
posted by chmmr at 4:47 PM on November 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

14. Reptiles on a passenger aircraft

It's really a timeless theme.
posted by dephlogisticated at 6:53 PM on November 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

achrise
Y'all have gotten away from what they actually did.
No, we got it.

Nobody scored how Victor Frankenstein nor his Monster were doing during the course of the novel.
Nobody's assuming anything of the sort.

While not a perfect tool – it looks at words in isolation, ignoring context
Yes, that's what we're criticizing for being pointless.
posted by signal at 7:11 PM on November 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

This is the literary equivalent to those studies that show Only 10 Companies Produce 98% Of The World's Greenhouse Gas Emissions and then you click through and it's....the 10 biggest oil companies, who then sell the oil to [billions of people for millions of purposes] which then results in greenhouse gas emissions. It's not wrong, exactly, but it sure is dumb.

Also, it's too short. I mean, purely from a mathematical standpoint you can clearly see that if the pattern goes, as justkevin pointed out:

1. +
2. -
3. + -
4. - +
5. + - +
6. - + -

Then it logically follows that there's nothing stopping you from writing "new" stories just by writing longer stories, e.g.:

7. + - + -
8. - + - +
9. + - - +
10. - + + -
11. + - + - +
&tc., &tc.

One may refer to this continuation of the pattern as the "Song of Ice and Fire Corollary".
posted by mstokes650 at 7:13 PM on November 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Ted: That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with Five Basic Plots. Then you're in trouble, huh?

A the number of basic plots decreases, the average story density calculated as (number of stories ÷ number of plots) increases, in other words, the plots thicken.
posted by otherchaz at 7:42 PM on November 11, 2023 [9 favorites]

Imagine seeing a study done on English novels and thinking that this generalised to "every story in the world".

Imagine.
posted by flabdablet at 5:32 AM on November 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots

That's gonna save TV Tropes a hell of a lot of disk space.
posted by flabdablet at 5:41 AM on November 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

So where does the Lord of the Rings fall? I don’t think of it as even being about rise and fall of fortunes at all really. Instead of “six kinds of stories” , isn’t this just “six sequences of general moods?”
posted by caviar2d2 at 9:02 AM on November 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Given the lack of free time everyone complains about, I recommend that all novels have a big number 1 through 6 on the cover so I’ll know what I’m getting into. Nope, I read a 3 last week. Maybe a 1 this week. Or just cycle 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 over and over. If these numbers have any significance I would assume that there must be some useful function for them.

This reminds me of a very old joke.

Guy goes to prison. After dinner the first night all the old lags are hanging around smoking and chatting and suddenly one of them says "72", and they all laugh.

Another one waits a few minutes, then says: "43" and everybody laughs.

Finally another one looks around, takes a drag on his cigarette, and says slowly: "32", and all the others laugh.

The new guy asks the man sitting next to him, "what the hell is going on?" and the old lag says, "listen, we've all been in here so long that we've heard all the jokes we all know, and so to save time we have assigned each joke a number, so instead of wasting time going over it all again we just say the number and people laugh."

So the next night after dinner the lags are sitting around again and the new guy sees his chance and says: "22!"

Utter silence.

He looks around again, then says: "47"

Utter silence.

Finally, confused, he says: "48"

Utter silence.

He looks over to the guy who explained the scheme to him the day before and asks: "what the hell is going on?"

And the old lag says:

"Some people just don't know how to tell a joke!"
posted by chavenet at 9:12 AM on November 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

...crickets...

"86!"

[room erupts in riotous laughter]
posted by flabdablet at 9:48 AM on November 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I wonder how “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” would look with this sort of analysis?
posted by TedW at 11:15 AM on November 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

6a. Man in a hole - ether, mescaline, bats
posted by flabdablet at 9:00 PM on November 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

I wonder what Gravity’s Rainbow’s graph looks like?
posted by skyscraper at 10:10 PM on November 12, 2023

It's a parabola, natch.
posted by chavenet at 1:02 AM on November 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Hmm interesting article, but I'm pretty sure we all know there are SEVEN types of stories:

Man vs Man. Man vs Dog. Dog vs Zombie. James Bond. Stories of Kings and Lords. Women Over 50 Finding Themselves After Divorce. Aaaaand Car Commercial.
posted by rabbitbookworm at 8:04 AM on November 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

> This reminds me of a very old joke.

I like the alternate ending: The new guy decides to give it a try, and throws a number out. After a brief pause, everyone bursts into screaming laughter, slapping their thighs and wiping tears from their eyes. When it finally dies down, he asks what could have possibly caused such a reaction.
"We hadn't heard that one before."
posted by lucidium at 8:08 AM on November 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

yeah, that's 77.
posted by chavenet at 9:40 AM on November 13, 2023

A writing teacher once taught there are only two plots: I am going on a trip, and a stranger came to town.
posted by touchstone033 at 10:31 AM on November 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

That's far too long. Here's the *real* list that describes every plot ever:

1) The main events of a play, novel, film, or similar work.

Hey, it's as useful a list as the ones presented thus far. If not more so.
posted by kyrademon at 10:43 AM on November 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I miss Kurt Vonnegut.

I saw Vonnegut speak in the 1990s. He began by asking the audience for a show of hands of who had seen him speak before. Then he said "Well, it's the same crap this time."
posted by neuron at 3:59 PM on November 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

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