Author of adventure/thriller and horror fiction

Research Reveals Six Core Story Emotional Arcs

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Advances in computing power enable researchers to analyze novels to determine what makes some stories appealing and others less so. University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide researchers hypothesized that certain story arcs are more meaningful to humans. This built on a lecture by Kurt Vonnegut, where he made a similar hypothesis. The method basically entails looking at a novel as a line that bends down when happiness decreases and up when it increases, producing a visible emotional arc.

Analyzing more than 1,300 works in Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection, the researchers determined there are six primary emotional arcs that provide the foundation of complex stories. These emotional arcs, they found, correlate with greater success, measured in number of downloads. These are:

* “Rags to riches” stories, in which the arc rises over the course of the story
* “Riches to rags” stories, in which the arc falls over the course of the story
* “Man in a hole” stories, in which the emotional arc falls then rises
* “Icarus” stories, in which the arc rises then falls
* “Cinderella” stories, in which the arc rises, falls, then rises again
* “Oedipus” stories, in which the arc falls, rises, then falls again

Emotional arc for ROMEO AND JULIET, a "riches to rags" story.
Emotional arc for ROMEO AND JULIET, a “riches to rags” story.

The result is a fascinating analysis of what people want in a good story. If you’re a reader, what’s your favorite story arc? If you’re a writer, do any of these fit your stories?

Check out the research study here. A WASHINGTON POST article breaks it down here. Below is the Kurt Vonnegut lecture that illustrates the concept beautifully and presents two curves, one for “man in a hole,” the other for “Cinderella.”

THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE (2016)

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THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE (2016) caused something of a sensation as an indie horror movie, and I was happy to get to see it.

Two coroners, a father and son, are tasked with determining the cause of death for a young woman discovered half-buried in a house where a horrific slaughter occurred. What follows is a nightmare as the woman’s secrets are discovered.

The firm stars the great Brian Cox, a terrific actor who’s had many parts in his career, from Agamemnon in TROY to Argyle Wallace in BRAVEHEART. Emile Hirsch does a great job in the role of his son. Olwen Catherine Kelly plays Jane Doe, a challenging role as she essentially lies nude and motionless the entire film while still managing to express tragedy and pain.

jane-doe

From the descriptions of the movie, I was hoping for something of a whodunnit, where two coroners piece together a woman’s tragic death. Instead, AUTOPSY is a traditional horror movie that in many ways reminded me of OCULUS. The former concept intrigued me far more than the latter, though AUTOPSY is in many respects a very good horror film carried by great performances, the fun of provoking a supernatural force by conducting an autopsy, and the essential mystery of who Jane Doe is. The script is excellent, giving us two men who respond to everything fairly realistically. The pacing is great. The last act is exciting but fairly typical for the genre, and sadly, for me, any gravitas the film achieves is squandered in the last few seconds when the writers throw the viewer a wink.

If you like horror movies, definitely check it out. It’s a fun one.

THE IRON HEEL By Jack London

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the iron heel by jack londonThis is Jack London like you’ve never read him. In THE IRON HEEL, his sweeping Dystopian novel published in 1908, a young upper class woman meets a socialist firebrand and becomes entwined in his destiny to play a part in a bloody class war fought on the streets of America.

Labor, pushed deep into poverty and fed up with its share of the produce of capital, rebels against the capitalist class and elects socialists to Congress, which dispels with the trappings of democracy and forms a fascist government in order to hold onto its vast wealth and subvert labor to slavery. So the socialists, who believe the answer is to bring ownership of capital to everyone, begin their long revolution … The result is a novel George Orwell called a “truer prophecy of the future than either BRAVE NEW WORLD or THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME,” and according to Orwell’s biographer influenced his writing of 1984.

London was remarkably prescient about some things–the capitalists trump up a war to eliminate their capital surplus (the pretext of which is the Germans launching a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor) to start a world war in 1913, a Great Depression occurs, the press and church attack people who speak out on behalf of social justice, fascism takes root, and so on. He also explains the never ending class struggle in easily understandable terms that are relevant today.

While most Americans value socialism for certain things (Social Security, Medicare, post office, police, firefighters, etc.), they have a cultural distaste for it, and so the modern reader will likely not embrace the socialist solution proposed in the novel, seeing as how it worked out for the Soviet Union. And yet this was written long before the New Deal, progressive taxation, Social Security, the GI Bill, legal unionization/striking, Sherman Antitrust Act and so on helped to build what was once a strong middle class in America–a system that attempted to balance capitalism, which produces innovation, growth and opportunity, and socialism, which reduces cost for certain services, protects labor from capitalism’s excesses, and tries to make the system as a whole serve the needs of the many, not just the few.

Reading THE IRON HEEL, therefore, may feel anachronistic with its stark choices of all capitalism or all socialism, but the basic issues involved–a capitalist builds a factory, workers produce goods in the factory, those goods produce a profit, now who gets what share of the profit?–are just as relevant today. Consider, for example, that since 2000, almost all economic gains in America went to capital, and labor got almost no share of the growth, and one can begin to understand growing anger and social unrest in America. Reading THE IRON HEEL, we also see how the system responds when it’s threatened–with violence, just as today. London’s America portrays a living hell in which capital and labor fight a never ending war for power.

the iron heel by jack london Reading THE IRON HEEL, therefore, may feel anachronistic with its stark choices of all capitalism or all socialism, but the basic issues involved–a capitalist builds a factory, workers produce goods in the factory, those goods produce a profit, now who gets what share of the profit?–are just as relevant today. Consider, for example, that since 2000, almost all economic gains in America went to capital, and labor got almost no share of the growth, and one can begin to understand growing anger and social unrest in America. Reading THE IRON HEEL, we also see how the system responds when it’s threatened–with violence, just as today. London’s America portrays a living hell in which capital and labor fight a never ending war for power.

THE IRON HEEL will make you think. Guaranteed. It will make you think about where America came from, what it might have been, where it might be going. I highly recommend it.

The OA

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The OA, a Netflix original series, tells the story of Prairie Johnson (Brit Marling), a blind woman who went missing seven years ago and resurfaces in a public suicide attempt. She survives the attempt, but miraculously she can now see.

What follows is quite a ride as Prairie seeks to get back to the people she left behind by recruiting five local people to hear her story and enact a ritual that will accomplish this. Her story of her captivity is both horrifying and hopeful, and in many ways it mirrors her life and those of the people she recruited. The sense of being trapped and alone but finding hope in community.

The spiritual aspect is interesting without being ham-fisted and preachy. In fact, I particularly enjoyed how seriously it took its sometimes crazy subject material. And whether you accept Prairie’s story as true doesn’t matter, as a spiritual journey is accomplished by everyone in the story either way, which I thought was a brilliant aspect of the show.

Th OA seems largely to have gotten either highly positive or negative reactions. Mine was fairly positive. The ending seemed somewhat contrived, but while we don’t have all the answers, it did resolve the character arcs for both Prairie and her followers. While I would have liked something more soaring and definitive, it still worked for me understanding what the show’s creators were trying to do. Like I said, whether true or not, a spiritual journey was accomplished, with interesting lessons for the viewer.

Marling has promised the OA will provide many answers if it gets a second season. I, for one, hope it does.

THEY LOOK LIKE PEOPLE (2015)

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they-look-like-peopleOld friends Wyatt and Christian bump into each other in New York City. Christian is lonely after his girlfriend left him, so he invites Wyatt to stay at his apartment. He overcompensates for his insecurities (born from being a bullied skinny kid in high school) by working out and being aggressive on the job. Wyatt just left his fiancee. Their friendship looks promising to get them both through a rough patch.

The only problem is Wyatt keeps getting late night phone calls. A voice tells him monsters live among us, and they are waiting for a signal to destroy the world. Wyatt must stay strong and prepare his defenses so he can fight back.

Are Wyatt’s experiences real, or is he losing his mind? It’s pretty clear it’s the latter. I found it interesting the way the voice changes when Wyatt meets new people and his life changes. Christian becomes aware of Wyatt’s illness and stays friends with him. He agrees to take part in Wyatt’s fantasies to show him that once they’re proven wrong, Wyatt will snap out of it and agree to treatment.

It’s a good movie, though it frays at the seams throughout until it feels like it’s falling apart. Christian’s character development is odd at best and often doesn’t seem to make sense. The moments when you’re in Wyatt’s point of view and experiencing the apocalypse are genuinely scary. In the end, the movie wasn’t great, but it didn’t suck, and it certainly had more potential than it realized. It’s a worthwhile film that could have been made stronger with a tighter script and by making it more ambiguous whether Wyatt is ill or what’s happening to him is real. FRAILTY did that brilliantly. Toward that end, they might have told the whole film from Wyatt’s point of view and left you guessing. Or they could have gone the other way–tell the story completely from Christian’s point of view and make it about a man who wants to do right by his friend such that he plunges into the fantasy himself.

One thing about the film really disturbed me, which is the amount of trust Christian puts in Wyatt (regardless of his motivations), who is heavily delusional and potentially homicidal. You can’t reason somebody with mental illness out of a delusion. When I was in college, I temped at an outpatient clinic for a summer, and I asked the resident psychiatrist, “If somebody thinks he’s Jesus, why can’t you quiz him on the Bible, and when he gets it wrong, you can show him in fact he is not Jesus?” She said, “He’d say you have the wrong Bible.” What Wyatt needs is care and probably medication.