this blogpost is full of good news!

Some words mean the exact same thing, just one is intended as positive while the other is negative.

Like 'complex' vs 'complicated'. The first is praise, the second is criticism.

Or 'simple' vs 'simplistic'. Actually, a lot people get those meanings reversed, so you have to be a mind-reader to figure out which one is intended as positive.

And there's some people who read both of them as negative. Like the term 'simple-minded'. So they need other terms to mean the same thing as a compliment, such as 'minimalist' or 'straightforward', but those words are more complex so they're not really valuing simplicity, are they?

What was my point here again....

Oh right.

ARTICLE: Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots

ARTICLE: Data Mining Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling (basically the same thing )

the six basic plots are sine, cosine, tangent, secant, cosecant, and cotangent

With these kinds of articles on research, you have to be careful to seperate the results from the conclusions. Always question the conclusions, because they might be very stupid even if the data fits perfectly.

How many times have I seen the famous Milgram experiment used as evidence for some sweeping statement on human nature? And I've seen multiple different interpretations of the experiment that seem equally likely. And besides, it later turned out that Milgram manipulated the results to discard data that didn't support his view, so it was fake science all along.

Well, they found six categories of story shapes based on data mining, nevermind that they selected for only a single variable in all the stories. And I'm already suspicious in general when anybody declares they've simplified everything into a few broad categories. Calling them "building blocks"? They could be, but these are overall shapes of the whole. They found the structures, not the nucleotides or atoms. I can certainly see the holistic structure resembling the smaller parts, like a fractal, but they didn't really prove that, now did they?

Forget their conclusions, they're not very useful for writing anyway. But what is interesting are the results themselves. Analyzing the sentiment of individual words gives you clear shapes. There are flaws with this, like how the computer can't detect sarcasm or irony, and also has trouble with negation ("this is not a fun party") unless programmed with exceptions, but those make a negligible dent in the overall scores. Even when there's a combination of positive & negative in the same section, they ratio even changes along with the story arc.

Looking up some blogs of people actually doing this stuff, I learned that they don't seriously think this is useful for analyzing literature. NLP is designed for speech recognition and AI, things like that, and I get the impression that using it on novels is just a fun test to see how it works with huge chunks of text. And it's not a bad test, if it shows that the computers can recognize emotional arcs pretty close to the ones we intuitively recognize (it's just confirming what we already know, not DISCOVERING THE SECRET TO FICTION or anything like that).

And it's interesting to know that most novels will tell you if events are good/bad by the use of positive/negative sentiment in word choice. You don't even have to know the full context, the choice of words works on its own. If something sad is happening, you'll probably instinctively use sad emotional words, not cheerful ones. Though this makes me wonder if the opposite could be effective when done right. And maybe the "shapes" of these stories aren't quite so important as the slope of the graph - things noticably getting better or worse or both. We tend to notice that in stories and it makes a big impact in how we enjoy them. Or categorize them at least. Though I'm quite sure it shouldn't be the only value of a story.

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Anyway. They keep namedropping Kurt Vonnegut as an inspiration for this research. They link to an old talk he gave, on the shapes of stories.

They're using the wrong one. It's incomplete, that youtube video cuts off before he gets to the end of his lesson.

Watch this one instead.

It's an hour long, so if you only want the relevant part, jump to 37:30. You'll skip a lot of his pointless anecdotes and jokes.

Though I think the most interesting human beings can go on endlessly telling anecdotes, and they won't be pointless at all, but building for you a clear understanding of their viewpoint. I love watching videos of Steve Wozniak's talks from the 80s. He loves to share stories about all the childish pranks and joke inventions he did in school. It occurred to me that he's not just sharing nostalgia or bragging, but this is his idea of how to shape people into becoming creative and innovative.

I think listening to Kurt Vonnegut talk for an hour reveals more intelligence and wisdom than any of those research results I linked back there. And I'm pretty sure he's doing this whole "shapes of stories" idea with a large dose of irony and humor (the NLP researchers couldn't detect that either, amirite? ). He's not taking this super seriously. But he is building up to a point.

The five minute video version doesn't get to where he covers two strange exceptions. Two stories that don't really plot an interesting graph at all, at least compared to the famous archetypes he describes. But they're still considered important works.

"Does this have any use in criticizing literature? I think perhaps it does. I think this rise and fall is in fact artificial. It pretends that we know more about life than we really do."

We don't know what the good news is, and what the bad news is.

"All we do is echo the feelings of people around us. Imagine a little kid, 3 or 4 years old. And the parents are SO excited. They have the most wonderful piece of news for this kid. Here's the terrific news, the bombshell: IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY! What could be a more empty piece of information?"

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Once there was a Chinese farmer who worked his poor farm together with his son and their horse. When the horse ran off one day, neighbors came to say, “How unfortunate for you!” The farmer replied, “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
When the horse returned, followed by a herd of wild horses, the neighbors gathered around and exclaimed, “What good luck for you!” The farmer stayed calm and replied, “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
While trying to tame one of wild horses, the farmer’s son fell, and broke his leg. He had to rest up and couldn’t help with the farm chores. “How sad for you,” the neighbors cried. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” said the farmer.
Shortly thereafter, a neighboring army threatened the farmer’s village. All the young men in the village were drafted to fight the invaders. Many died. But the farmer’s son had been left out of the fighting because of his broken leg. People said to the farmer, “What a good thing your son couldn’t fight!” “Maybe yes, maybe no,” was all the farmer said.

Makes me think... in all those books they analyzed above, maybe we're just echoing whatever the author tells us is good news or bad news, like an excited parent. We interpret the sentiment in the word choices, and form the arc in our mind based on that. Maybe that's why we get addicted to the «same stories» over and over. What ARE we reading?

What an amazing guy, Kurt Vonnegut. The end of his speech there made me cry a little.

I, um, never read any of his books. I want to fix that soon.

Comments

[horizon]

Vonnegut is a thoroughly awesome dude and pretty much my go-to in several areas of personal/professional/authorial wisdom. "Live by the harmless untruths that keep you happy and healthy and sane" is Vonnegut. "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be" is Vonnegut. "Use the time of a [reader] in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted" is Vonnegut.

His actual writing requires a strong taste for the absurd (and, sometimes, profane, in the sense of the opposite of sacred).

It's an interesting combination.