Throughout his artistic career, Kurt Vonnegut made a vast number of contributions to the art of storytelling. But did you know that the work he considered his most important was rejected outright?

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Vonnegut wrote his master's thesis for anthropology on the notion that "stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society's stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads."


Essentially, what these graphs reveal is that every story has a certain shape; many stories, in fact, share the same shape. These shapes can be found by tracing the ups and downs of the protagonist's journey—or "the emotional arc" of the story. Vonnegut's rejected masters thesis defines the emotional arc of a story as a line plotted on the ‘Beginning-End’ and ‘Ill Fortune-Great Fortune’ axes. The "GI" axis, mathematically similar to the y-axis, places Ill Fortune, defined by Vonnegut as "sickness and poverty," at the bottom, and Good Fortune, "wealth and boisterous good health," at the top. The "BE" axis, the equivalent of the mathematical x-axis, represents the beginning and end of the story. The line flows somewhere in between.

All stories fall into six emotional arcs—or, rather, three arcs and their inverses.

Back in 1995, Vonnegut gave a simple demonstration as to how his thesis works:

Vonnegut provides us with three examples of emotional arcs: the "Man in Hole" arc, the "Boy Meets Girl" arc, and the "Cinderella" arc. In addition to these arcs, he was also said to define the "From Bad To Worse," "Which Way is Up," "Creation Story," "Old Testament," and "New Testament" arcs.

Below, graphic designer Maya Eilam put together a handy infographic illustrating the emotional arcs which Vonnegut believed could match with every story in written language.

VonnegutCourtesy of Maya Eilam

Fast forward to 2016: a group of students in the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont in Burlington has finally proven, without a doubt, that Vonnegut and his thesis were correct. Andrew J. Reagan, along with colleagues Lewis Mitchell, Dilan Kiley, Christopher M Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds are the minds behind the new scientific article The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes.

The article begins with an abstract explaining how "our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories and forming patterns that are meaningful to us." These emotional trajectories are equivalent to Vonnegut's "story shapes."

Modern technology has its advantages, however. Whereas Vonnegut hypothesized that these emotional arcs could be analyzed by computers, Reagan and co. went ahead and used computers to find them. Their methodology is difficult to summarize, assuming you aren't familiar with "matrix decomposition by singular value decomposition (SVD), supervised learning by agglomerative (hierarchical) clustering with Ward’s method, or unsupervised learning by a self-organizing map (SOM, a type of neural network). If you do understand this level of mathematics, then, by all means, take a deeper dive into the article in its entirety.

Is there a film or a story that naturally compels you? Try to define the emotional arc of that story and adopt it for your own.

For those of us who are less mathematically inclined, the researchers used a filtered subset of 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection, analyzed 10,000 words based on their general implied sentiment, and rated them on a scale of happiness. They used a Hedonometer, which is a tool that gauges happiness or pleasure for "its ability to generate meaningful word shift graphs," or graphs that measure changes in word frequencies, producing spikes or dips in happiness.

In simplest terms, the University of Vermont team "examined the emotional arc that is invoked through the words used." As the words appear in the books they sampled (all fictional and written in the English language), a story arc is drawn in relation to the frequency of happy or sad words present within each portion of the book. This arc in the frequency of when happy or sad words appear can be related to the ups and downs of the protagonist's journey.

To put this into some sort of context, you can check out a list of films ranked by happiness compiled using the same method by Hedonometer. Below are examples from the article on how this arc is illustrated:

Screen_shot_2016-11-28_at_3Courtesy of Andrew J. Reagan

When the arcs of the 1,300 books were compared to each other, the researchers found that all stories fell into six emotional arcs—or, rather, three arcs and their inverses. They named them as follows:

  • Rags to riches (rise): SV 1

    • A steady, ongoing rise in emotional valence, as in a rags-to-riches story, such as Alice’s Adventures Underground by Lewis Carroll.
  • Tragedyor Riches to rags (fall): SV 1

    • A steady ongoing fall in emotional valence, as in a tragedy such as Romeo and Juliet.
  • Man in a hole (fall-rise): SV 2

    • A fall, then a rise, such as the man-in-a-hole story, discussed by Vonnegut.
  • Icarus (rise-fall): SV 2

    • A rise, then a fall, such as the Greek myth of Icarus.
  • Cinderella (rise-fall-rise): SV 3

    • Rise-fall-rise, such as Cinderella.
  • Oedipus (fall-rise-fall): SV 3

    • Fall-rise-fall, such as Oedipus.

13688_2016_93_fig4_htmlCourtesy of Andrew J. Reagan.

What's more, they found that a few of the story arcs were considerably more successful than the rest. By comparing the stories with their new arc categorization to the number of times the book had been downloaded from Project Gutenberg, the research team was able to see which arcs attracted readers. They found that "Icarus," "Oedipus," and "Man-in-a-hole" were the three most successful emotional arcs.

Clearly, a story's emotional arc a story is important to its success. Next time you're thinking of writing a screenplay and don't know where to start, consider beginning your brainstorm with one of these six emotional arcs. Use the emotional arc as a starting point and unravel your plot from there. Is there a film or a story that naturally compels you? Try to define the emotional arc of that story and adopt it for your own. It's not stealing; it's scientifically referred to as "narratology," a component of folkloristics devoted to the study of "a series of events, real or fictional, presented to the reader or the listener."

Without these six arcs, storytelling would be impossible. Or, you know, "experimental."

Source: EPJ Data Science