Everyone who secretly thought that all novels have the same plot can feel vindicated by new research supporting that suspicion. Sort of.
Researchers from the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont in Burlington used sentiment analysis—or analysis of emotion in a string of words—to map the plot of over 1,700 works of fiction. By looking at how the emotional tone of a story changes from moment to moment, the researchers could see the overall emotional arc of the stories.
They found that there were six main ones:
- Fall-rise-fall, like Oedipus Rex
- Rise and then a fall, like what happens to most villains
- Fall and then a rise, like what happens to most superheroes
- Steady fall, like in Romeo and Juliet
- Steady rise, like in a rags-to-riches story
- Rise-fall-rise, like in Cinderella
via Gizmodo
I think songs do something similar.
Also.
Looking at the set of six and encoding them as 0 for fall and 1 for rise, I wonder if there is a 7th (and 8th) plot? There might be two variants each of the rise,fall and fall,rise plots. These would be encoded 001 011 and 100 110. The first could be described as long fall then rise vs short fall, long rise.
This “8 story” outcome fits with what my headmaster at school (many years ago) told us!