35. Basically, there are only 6 stories.
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Famous author Kurt Vonnegut said all the stories in this world —from the oldest fairytales to the next Spielberg blockbuster—have six simple shapes that can be plotted on a chart.
Tracing the ups and downs of the protagonist's journey—or "the emotional arc" of the story—can reveal these shapes.
His master's thesis on “The Shapes of Stories” was initially rejected because of its simplicity, but it has since become the foundational structure for storytelling and script analysis.
In 2016, data scientists at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont in Burlington analyzed 1,327 books to find this idea scientifically correct. The most popular stories followed the Icarus and Oedipus arcs.
This has several marketing implications, such as the arcs could be used as starting points to generate compelling brand stories and different story arcs could be tested to see what works best for an audience.
If you want to write a bestseller, here are the top 3 story arcs. There are even tools available to do in-depth analysis of your stories to help you build a better structure.
Love it ! Esp the crispness of it !