The emotional arcs of stories
The emotional arcs of stories
What does data science tell us about emotional arcs in stories? And what happens when we combine that with the lessons shared by Kurt Vonnegut in his seminal 2004 lecture on the shapes of story?
I want to talk about emotional arcs in stories today, but don’t let that overshadow these other awesome things in this newsletter:
Write On Track, an 8-week writing group facilitated by ex-Penguin Random House developmental story editor and Martha Beck-trained coach — Kelly Norwood-Young — begins on the 15th of July (more on this below!)
The latest app release (v1.0.62) includes bug fixes for comments and some niggly Google login issues.
The emotional arcs of stories
A few months ago I discovered a research study from 2016 by a team of data scientists at the University of Adelaide, where they took 1327 classic novels from Project Gutenberg and plotted the emotional arcs of each story.
As writers, we know that when we’re crafting a story, we’re really designing an emotional experience for our readers. There’s a reason why we describe a story as a rollercoaster. We’re building theme parks out of letters!
If plot structure looks at pacing the story’s events in chronological order, then the emotional arc concerns that rollercoaster — how each of your story beats evokes an emotional response in your reader. What I love most about this study is that it makes that rollercoaster visual real.
The UoA research team found broad support for 6 emotional arcs (page 6). They look like this:
When thinking about the emotional cadence of a story, there’s another resource I really love: Kurt Vonnegut’s lecture on the 8 shapes of stories (which are really 8 structures for the emotional cadence of a story). The UoA team were actually inspired by his work when they did their study.
His shapes look like this:
You can see that the UoA team didn’t find (at least in their data set) evidence for a ‘From bad to worse’, ‘Which way’s up?’ or ‘Old testament’ story arc. And Vonnegut didn’t include the ‘Tragedy’, ‘Icarus’, or ‘Oedipus’ arcs that UoA did.
Note: You could argue that ‘Oedipus’ is a truncated version of the ‘Old testament’ arc, and I think the Rags to riches story arc is similar enough to the ‘Creation’ story arc to be considered the same. Likewise for ‘New testament’ and ‘Boy meets girl’
If you consider both the work of Vonnegut and UoA alongside each other, there’s really 10 emotional arcs, and they seem to be defined by the following factors:
All stories start with either a positive, neutral or negative emotional valence.
All stories end on either a positive or negative emotional valence (never neutral).
The emotional arc of the story either rises or falls after the story starts.
There are anywhere from 1 to 7 changes in emotional valence over the course of the story.
Each successive change is bigger than the one before it.
Write On Track — an 8-week writing group
Write On Track is an 8-week writing group, centred around building a sustainable writing practice, balancing writing and life, and getting to that finish-line in one piece. Our goal is to help you meet other writers, share lessons, and create accountability for actually finishing that first draft.
It’ll be run by Kelly Norwood-Young, an ex-Penguin Random House developmental story editor and Martha Beck-trained professional coach. You’ll love her, she’s fantastic.
Joining the 8-week writing group means you get:
1.5-hour weekly group writing sessions facilitated by Kelly.
A 1-on-1 coaching session worth $80 with Kelly.
An annual FDP premium subscription worth $85 (if you already have an annual subscription, this will be added to your account as a credit for when your subscription renews).
An FDP overview session where we’ll discuss how to get the most out of your subscription.
Details:
Dates: 15 July — 6 September
Cost: $430
Weekly Writing Group Sessions
You’ll choose your writing group time slot when you register, so make sure you can attend the session regularly at that time:
1-on-1 Professional Coaching Session
Can be booked for a time that suits you before the end of 2024.
Bug Fixes in First Draft Pro (v 1.0.62)
We’ve fixed two pesky bugs that crept in (thanks so much to everyone who raised these with me, I appreciate you!)
Comment threads — We fixed a bug in the comments thread that was changing the original author of a comment to be the person who last replied on that thread (confusing!). You shouldn’t see this again 🙂
Google sign-in — Google made some changes to the way that they’re managing single sign-on. It’s now handled through the browser, which means if you’re logged out of your browser, you’ll struggle to get in to FDP. We’ve put some fallbacks in place to help with this, and we’ve updated the login issues help article to help you troubleshoot if you notice this happening.