Determining Different Story Types by the Ending

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. Those seven story types are:

Overcoming the Monster
Rags to Riches
The Quest
Voyage and Return
Rebirth
Comedy
Tragedy
This list comes from Booker’s seminal book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. It took him 34 years of research and reading to complete the 700-page psychoanalytic tome. 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.



Crunching story types and plot down to three
Although 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. A list made by Foster-Harris in 1959 claimed there are only three types of stories:

Happy ending
Unhappy ending
Tragedy
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 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.



The Hedonometer: An emotional approach to narrative and story type
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 purpose was to track the emotional content of the plot by looking for words such as ‘tears,’ ‘laughed,’ ‘enemy,’ ‘poison’ and so on.

Throughout any story, they describe building happy emotions as rise, and sadder emotions as fall. Their results concluded that there were six basic story types:
“Rags to riches” (rise).
“Tragedy,” or “Riches to rags” (fall).
“Man in a hole” (fall–rise).
“Icarus” (rise–fall).
“Cinderella” (rise–fall–rise).
“Oedipus” (fall–rise–fall).
The entire research paper is available to read online, but it’s heavy going. Rather wonderful, however, are the emotion graphs produced to track the patterns of happiness during the narrative arc. Here, for example, we see the analyzed emotional arc of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling:



Hedonometer Score for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone



Dubbed the Hedonometer, the results of this analysis for a wide variety of novels is also free to view online, and makes for a fascinating resource for writers who like to analyze books in detail.

Of course, not every story in the world has been analyzed, but most of the classics and popular books are there for you to peruse. (It’s also worth bearing in mind that this most recent analysis only looked at fiction available on Guttenberg – mostly older classics and all in English. Deeper exploration of other cultures and recent ideas might uncover a wholly new story type.)



So… have all our stories already been told?
Ultimately, what does all this science mean? If every story has already been written, is striving for originality a pointless task? The answer is no; it absolutely is not. While it may indeed be compelling – and likely true – that storytelling conventions are built on only six or seven broader foundations, the purpose of categorizing stories into broad types is as a way to understand fiction, not to limit our creativity or the ideas, values, and concepts we can explore.

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TIMECODES:
0:00 Intro
0:31 Antagonist Defeated/Goal Achieved
1:05 Antagonist Defeated/Goal Not Achieved
2:13 Antagonist Not Defeated/Goal Not Achieved
3:52 Antagonist Defeated/Goal Achieved
5:25 Antagonist Defeated/Goal Unsure
5:38 Antagonist Unsure/Goal Achieved

[stanislavf]

Good peripheral covering of various scenarios. I think most of these are covered by what Neil Gaiman said: the characters almost never get what they want, they get what they need. They just don't always know what they need. The best counter example to that, that you gave, is the 1984 story. I would argue in that particular story that the characters "Got what they needed to prove the point" the ending was fundamentally a call to action to the reader to not let a 1984 world come into existence. They NEEDED to both fail and fail badly. The character who got what they needed was the reader. Getting what a character needs is based on the goal of the book too. In 1984 the key question, as a writer, is "What is this book about?" With that question answered you can then focus on the characters getting what they need to answer that question.

[saycestsay]

Thanks for the analysis. I'm guessing my plotting problem is GOAL FIRST, then write (rather than DISCOVER GOAL WHILE WRITING, my own style.)