What is the hidden structure of stories, and why is it rooted in our brains?
--
This is Part 1 of a 4-article series about a new theory of storytelling that tries to explain why we love stories and why they have the structure they have.
Stories immerse us into imaginary worlds that pull us in. They grab all our attention. They immerse us.
How do they achieve that? In that state of hypnosis, it’s easy to miss their scaffolding. We’re so absorbed that we don’t realize that all stories follow the same pattern.
Even when we don’t know much about storytelling, we’ve seen so many stories that we intuitively know that they follow predetermined patterns.
Kurt Vonnegut also intuited these common patterns decades ago. In his Masters’ Thesis, he proposed that stories could only follow a few shapes. “It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun” he said.
Science vindicated him recently. A recent analysis of thousands of books through Artificial Intelligence noticed that nearly all books had one of only six emotional shapes.
This graph shows the analysis of hundreds and hundreds of books through artificial intelligence. Nearly all books had one of 6 structures only.
Book stories could either get more and more intensely positive (top left), they could become negative before they became positive again (top middle), or they could go up-down-up emotionally (top right). These 3 types of stories also had their opposite (bottom row), for a total of 6 stories.
In fact, nearly all book sales corresponded to the 2 most complex types of stories — the ones to the right. And since one is just the opposite of the other, we can say that nearly all successful stories have the same emotional pattern—according to science. They start somewhat negative, they become more and more positive before they turn quite negative, and at the last moment they become very positive.
These 6 story structures match with some of the story structures that Vonnegut unveiled decades ago.
According to this, the Cinderella story structure is the most famous and successful. Does that structure ring a bell? It’s nearly exactly the same structure as the one described in the first video, which is summarized here:
We have an artificial intelligence that has discovered that a single story structure is more successful than any other. We intuitively feel that this structure is right.
You’d imagine after this that most people would agree on the right structure of all stories. You’d be surprised… There are literally hundreds of story structure theories out there.
Some story theorists think there are 3 acts, other 5, other 6, 8, 22, 31… Nobody agrees on the true structure of stories. Why is this possible?
It reminds me of Architecture before the 19th Century. For millennia, architects built their structures based on trial and error. They build a house; it falls. “Ok, we shouldn’t do it this way… Let’s just do it the way we’ve always done it instead. It’s tried and true.”
They didn’t understand the science behind architecture. Physics and Chemistry were very basic. As a result, they couldn’t innovate easily. They couldn’t come up with new shapes and figure out whether they would stand up or not. Obviously, it’s pretty bad when you’re an architect and your new structure crumbles, so architects of the past were extremely conservative. For millennia, they were stuck to the same patterns over and over again: columns, arches, and domes. Innovate a bit, and your structures would crumble. So don’t innovate.
But once architects understood the science behind architecture, once Physics and Chemistry evolved enough that they could understand what was going on, they could start creating structures never imagined before. This is when architecture exploded. When we start getting the Eiffel Tower, skyscrapers, hanging bridges, and other impossible structures.
Storytelling is in the 19th Century equivalent of architecture today. We don’t understand the science behind stories. We don’t know what makes a good story and why. We can only make assumptions. So how can we really innovate? We’re just in this trial-and-error mode, terrified of innovation because most times we try to innovate, we fail.
My goal is to go beyond that. I want to push the science of storytelling farther by proposing a new set of 3 theories of storytelling. The goal of these theories is to shed more light on the structure of stories, their scientific underpinnings, and why they are the way they are. Hopefully, with these theories, storytellers will have a deeper understanding of story structure and will be able to innovate more. Here are the theories:
- Story Theory of Status and Learning: we’ve evolved to love telling stories because they give us status, and to love hearing them because we learn.
- Story Theory of Empathy: stories are the best way to get into somebody else’s brain to experience what they experience, feel their feelings, and think their thoughts.
- Story Theory of Rings: most stories follow an underlying structure that I call Rings, which is the structure of problem-solving.
To summarize the 3 theories together, this is what they claim:
Back a few hundred thousand years ago, when homo sapiens were still evolving, humans loved sharing their experiences because it gave them status: “I have killed ten lions!” As time passed, humans started sharing their experiences in the format of problems they encountered, and how they solved them. That would show to others that they were intelligent and resolutive, and it would give them status. So humans evolved to tell their experiences in problem-solving format. This problem-solving format is at the core of story structure.
Learning how to solve problems is highly valuable. The homo sapiens who loved stories (problem-solving) the most and learned the most from them would be able to solve more problems than others. They would survive more and spread their genes. So humans evolved to love stories because they taught them how to solve problems.
That evolution can be seen in the brain. When somebody tells a story, the audience absorbs everything. The brains of the audience want to optimize learning so much that they synchronize with the brain of the storyteller. That way, they can get into the mind of the person who had the experience and solved the problem, and can learn as if they were the ones to have that experience.
This has consequences on the sorts of stories that work the best. For example, they are the ones that clearly explain the problem the protagonist is trying to solve, explore how a normal person would solve the problem and why those solutions don’t work, share insights how the problem should be solved instead, and give us the final solution. But there are many more consequences on how stories should be structured for people to love them.
Each of these 3 theories will be the focus of one article in this 4-part series, starting with the evolutionary role of stories, continuing with the neuroscience of stories, and finishing with the impact on story structure.
If you’re interested in this topic, you should watch my TEDx Talk about it. If you want to read the next articles in this 4-part series, or if you like storytelling structure in general, follow me. I have written about different storytelling topics, such as the storytelling structure of Star Wars — which became an Amazon best-selling book — , the future of Game of Thrones characters, or why The Hateful Eight is non-linear.
