Types of Stories

Science Advances published a recent paper in which the scientists investigated how narrative reversals (what we authors tend to call plot twists) affect a story’s “success.”  A little like the paper we discussed recently on the impact of AI in storytelling, I found the paper intriguing and thought-provoking, if perhaps methodologically limited.  These sorts of papers where science and art intersect are always more about the thoughts they inspire than they are about the conclusions, in my opinion, because the conclusions necessarily come with so many caveats – in this case, how success is defined, how narrative reversals are defined, identified, quantified, and analyzed, the sampling of stories involved, et cetera.  This time, I was more intrigued by the rabbit hole the paper prompted me to go down than by the paper itself.  From it, I discovered an entire corpus of scientific literature on storytelling.

You might be surprised to learn that my grounding in the theory and formalisms of storytelling is relatively weak.  While I’ve read a few books on writing, like Ursula K Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, and studied the, well, craftsmanship of storytelling, I haven’t investigated as deeply the theory and abstract ideas underpinning the techniques of writing a good story.  In truth, I’ve long dismissed theories of storytelling as incidental to effective storytelling, arising more as a product of a critical class than as a useful tool for the storyteller.  My view thereon only began to change when one of my writing group members demonstrated an impressive ability to diagnose story problems for revisions based on his understanding of story theory.  Storytelling theory has potential as another tool in the writer’s toolbox, and it was with that mindset that I became intrigued by a 2016 paper purporting to identify six basic emotional arcs which all stories share.

The idea that there exist certain archetypes of stories, or certain categories of stories, or certain arcs of stories that are repeated over and over again in different forms and variations probably dates back at least to Aristotle, and I’ve always viewed such theories with a certain skepticism.  Sure, there are similarities between some stories, like how the Inheritance Cycle is basically a retelling of the original Star Wars trilogy with dragons (the Eragon–A New Hope connection is especially blatant), but surely it is painting with too broad a brush to say that the millions of stories humans have told themselves can all be slotted neatly into a handful of categories.  Nonetheless, with my new eye towards the legitimacy and utility of story theory, I was prepared to entertain the notion of types of stories afresh in this scientific context.

The paper, entitled The Emotional Arcs of Stories are Dominated by Six Basic Shapes, uses automatic processing of word clusters to perform sentiment analysis and thereby derive six basic emotional arcs into which stories fall: rags to riches (rise), tragedy/riches to rags (fall), man in a hole (fall-rise), Icarus (rise-fall), Cinderella (rise-fall-rise), and Oedipus (fall-rise-fall).  If we look at this mathematically, one wonders why we are limited to six, and if we should define types of stories based on the two parts of falling or rising, then why could we not have any pattern or combination?  Or, alternatively, why do we not have just two types, and stories exist by combining various patterns of rising and falling?  In that sense, every story consisting of some pattern of rising and falling is an amalgamation of microstories or microplots consisting of just a rise or just a fall.

Let’s try applying this to Charmers.  Charmers goes from content, to problems, to a hopeful note at the end.  Mapping it to one of the six identified story types, the protagonist fits best into man in a hole, with a “fall” of sorts in her problems with the luck-wielding cartel, and a rise in her successful escape from them.  Our other significant character, though, follows a different story type, aligning better with an Icarus story type, reaching a height of sorts during his initial meetings with our protagonist, only to lose everything and end up on the run in the end.  But even this is a matter of interpretation.  Thus, in this two-thousand-word story, we already have, in some sense, multiple story types at play.  If we were to examine Impressions, we would find something like rise-rise-fall-rise-rise-fall-fall-rise-rise-rise…maybe?  It depends on how far you break it down, and how you interpret some of what happens to Raven.  Do we then call Impressions a Cinderella-Icarus-tragedy-man-in-a-hole story?

When exploring the six story types, the paper authors do acknowledge that they are looking for large-scale patterns, and that stories don’t perfectly map to the modes they’ve identified.  The more complex modes, like Oedipus and Cinderella, tend to include more variation in the stories fitted to them.  Yet, if there’s so much variance, so much nuance, and so much that is subject to interpretation and idiosyncratic definitions, can these story types be a useful tool for those of us attempting to actually tell a story, and not merely analyze ones that have already been told?  The answer, as with so many things, is that it depends.

Specifically, it depends on your objective in applying it.  At least for the way my storytelling process works, these story types are far from my mind when I’m first thinking about a story I want to write.  I don’t set out to write a tragedy, or a hero’s journey – I look to write a story to explore some idea I have, or to follow an interesting character.  Where understanding types of stories comes into play is in the revision process.  That is where these insights can be helpful.