Throughout any story, they describe building happy emotions as rise, and sadder emotions as fall. The purpose was to track the emotional content of the plot by looking for words such as ‘tears,’ ‘laughed,’ ‘enemy,’ ‘poison’ and so on. More recently (and perhaps intriguingly) the University of Vermont took a leaf from one of author Kurt Vonnegut’s theories and used powerful computer programs to analyze data from 1,737 fiction stories. The Hedonometer: An emotional approach to narrative and story type A simple display of the potential outcomes for the hero of a story, the Foster-Harris list sadly ignores much of the structural nuance in story beats that Booker’s list accommodates. While you can place just about every story you can think of into one of these three plot types, it’s overly simplistic, offering little in the way of observation of actual story structure. A list made by Foster-Harris in 1959 claimed there are only three types of stories: But where did the idea of a limited number of stories come from? Is it true? If so, how does that affect writers – all of whom strive to create their own unique narrative experiences and conflict? Let’s dig a little deeper into this idea.Ĭrunching story types and plot down to threeĪlthough The Seven Basic Plots is the most frequently cited text today, Booker was not the first person to propose that there are a limited number of story types. It took him 34 years of research and reading to complete the 700-page psychoanalytic tome. This list comes from Booker’s seminal book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. Many academics, most notably author Christopher Booker, believe there are only seven basic narrative plots in all of storytelling – frameworks that are recycled again and again in fiction but populated by different settings, characters, and conflicts.
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