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The (very) surprising new science of story structure
This is You Are a Story, the place where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.
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Every student of story is familiar with the story arc. From Aristotle’s three acts of drama to Joseph Campbell’s twelve-beat ‘hero’s journey’ to the five acts of Gustav Freytag’s pyramid, all seem to offer an alluring Ultimate Secret of Success for authors, screenwriters and playwrights – and all have been deployed by countless storytellers, over the decades, to massively varying degrees of effect. When I was writing my first novel, The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone, I studied Christopher Booker’s five act plan (call to action, dream, frustration, nightmare, resolution) from his book The Seven Basic Plots as if it was a holy instruction, naively convinced that if I could only follow it with religious precision, I’d triumphantly enter the heaven of the bestseller lists.
Even after the gods of the lists denied entry to my novel, I remained a believer in plot-plans. Indeed, readers of The Science of Storytelling will know that I designed my own version of the five-act arc, that tried to marry movement in the layer of dramatic action with character change, so that the protagonist’s interior development was the active ingredient that pushed the story through its various stages to completion.
Arcs such as these are often oversold by their creators, who can be guilty of asserting that their version is essential and non-negotiable for any writer who seeks success. A mere glance at the variety that exists in human storytelling demonstrates such claims to be bullshit. But, for those still not convinced, we now have evidence in its untruth from the sciences. In 2020, researchers published the surprising results of an analysis of 40,000 ‘traditional narratives’, such as novels and film scripts, as well as 20,000 non-traditional narratives, from places like TED Talks and newspaper articles. Using a computational analysis of language, they found “strong, highly consistent evidence” of “narrative processes and structures that have been theorized by historical scholars such as Aristotle and Freytag.” In short, lots of traditional story structure. But were these structures successful? That is, was there a correlation found between their use and that story’s popularity? Stunningly, the answer was no. The researchers “found no clear differences” between highly rated and poorly rated stories “in terms of their narrative structure.”
Of course, we must as a rule be extremely careful about accepting counter-intuitive results from single studies. We might note, too, that their secondary analysis – the one that looked at whether arcs predicted success in fiction – used romance novels as a significant quotient of their source material. Most of these authors, they admit “were not professionals.” Indeed, the titles they analysed comprised “639 self-published books retrieved from Smashwords.com, a free e-book and online publishing platform.” If this material was of mostly low quality (and, dear reader, it was), no arc on earth would’ve saved it. But! As well as these amateur love stories, they also analysed 18,074 films, using their IMDb ratings. And still, then, they “found no evidence that people’s ratings of narrative quality or popularity were related to narrative structure.”
So what does work? Does anything? Are we to simply abandon the ancient pursuit of crafting story? Just dribble out some shapeless thing? Not according to a 2024 study