Remember that strange déjà vu feeling when you are watching a movie, or reading a novel? It might not be just an impression, as recent studies demonstrated that most fictional stories are based on six recurrent plots.
Vladimir Propp had already told us: if taking a close look at folktales, you can recognize a set of irreducible narrative elements, including characters’ types and functions, that any author makes full use of. Lately, a team of researchers from the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab leveraged innovative text-mining techniques to analyze more than 1,700 English novels, and found out that there are only six basic story types – sort of archetypes – acting as building blocks for storytelling. Interesting to notice, the study integrated some sentiment analysis, working with the same tools and statistical techniques that marketeers often use to score media coverage or social media posts.
We might want to play with BBC Culture and select some everlasting, best-loved stories to see this six-story theory in action. Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy exemplifies the ‘Rags to riches’ plot, telling about the imaginary journey from hell to heaven, from bad to good fortune. In Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, we’ll acknowledge the opposite scheme, ‘Riches to rags’, with the protagonist falling from good to bad, ending in tragedy. The ‘Icarus’ story type offers a rise then a fall in fortune, as William Shakespeare put into Romeo and Juliet.
Take Frankenstein by Mary Shelley to learn how ‘Oedipus’ works, moving from a fall to a rise, then back to a fall. The ‘Cinderella’ plot – rise, fall, rise – can be found in the homonym fairytale, as well as in its modern versions such as Pretty Woman romantic comedy. Finally, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, accurate readers can pinpoint the ‘Man in a hole’ narrative and its fall-to-rise dynamic. According to University of Vermont’s researchers, each story type can even be represented in a graph, thus drawing a typical curve that represents the emotional arc of any novel, movie or drama built on that plot scheme.
Should we take the six-story theory as the final word about storytelling? Probably not, but this is unquestionably another clue that we shouldn’t reinvent the wheel any time we want to create a good story.
