One of the most intriguing sections of the new Author Dashboard powered by Marlowe 3.0 is the new section on narrative arcs. Few other manuscript analysis tools even touch on the subject, but Marlowe takes a deep dive into identifying the type of story you’ve written.
(If you’re new to all of this, just click on “Dashboard” there in the top navigation.)
To authors, the idea of universal story archetypes seems a bit far-fetched, given the millions of stories in the marketplace with their countless twists and turns. Can most popular fiction really be grouped into these crude buckets?
But to frame the question in that way misses the point of archetypes. Perhaps a good place to start is to consider famed author Kurt Vonnegut’s obsession with “story shapes.”
Vonnegut argued that classic stories through the ages had predictable plot arcs with regular rhythms that could be denoted in a graph (on a piece of paper, on a blackboard, on a computer screen). He built a lecture around the theory and took it on the road. With his wry sense of humor, Vonnegut delighted a student audience in a 1985 lecture captured on video that made its way onto YouTube decades later:
Perennial rhythms to the stories we tell
Over time, Vonnegut developed a theory of eight universal story shapes. Fast forward three decades and the advent of machine learning. The video of Vonnegut talking about his theory of story shapes caught the eye of scholar and data scientist Matthew Jockers, co-author of The Bestseller Code and co-founder of Authors A.I. Based on his research, he wrote an algorithm that predicted with 83% accuracy whether a title would be included on the New York Times adult fiction bestseller list or not – based strictly on the contents of the novel. Plot structure and emotional story beats are among the key ingredients, as Vonnegut argued.
Jockers and the data team here at Authors A.I. used that code as the starting point to build Marlowe, our AI-based manuscript analysis tool. After analyzing thousands of popular fiction titles, it turns out that Marlowe concurs with the late Professor Vonnegut about story shapes at a high level, if not in all the specific details.
Marlowe deduced that stories generally fall into one of seven primary story archetypes:
- Emergence, where the story centers on the main character’s journey of transformation or her triumph over adverse circumstances. In recent literature, John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, Bruce W. Cameron’s A Dog’s Purpose, Danielle Steel’s The Gift and William P. Young’s The Shack fit the Emergence story shape.
- Man in the Hole, which Vonnegut summarized this way: “Somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again.” Modern examples include John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury, Matthew Quick’s The Silver Linings Playbook, Anita Diamant’s The Boston Girl, Charlaine Harris’s From Dead to Worse, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and Dennis Lehane’s Sacred.
- Descent, in which the heroes triumph over powerful foes, but then the story takes a darker turn and ends in loss or a major setback. Examples include Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada, Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan, Mary Higgins Clarke’s Where Are the Children, Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, John D. MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Good-by, Candace Bushell’s Sex and the City, Mark Edwards’s The Magpies, and Sara Shepard’s Pretty Little Liars.
- The Quest, in which the protagonist and companions set off on an adventure to retrieve a valuable object or achieve some other tangible goal despite formidable obstacles along the way. most of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Emily Giffin’s Love the One You’re With, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and Steve Berry’s The Lincoln Myth have shapes that correspond to the Quest story archetype.
- Rags to Riches, in which the main character gains something through a happy twist of fate – wealth, prestige, love, power – loses it, then regains it at the end. Modern examples include Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife, Stephen King’s Misery, Robert Ludlum’s The Aquitaine Progression, Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, Anita Shreve’s Testimony, and Sandra Brown’s Smoke Screen.
- Voyage and Return, in which characters are plunged into a strange and foreign land, come to grips with it, confront setbacks and dark turns but wind up in the end with a return to safety and some form of normalcy. Andy Weir’s The Martian, Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook, James Patterson’s Hope to Die, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road use the Voyage and Return story archetype.
- Rise and Fall, in which a dark force confronts the protagonist, he overcomes that challenge, but then things fall apart at the end. E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Stephen King’s The Stand, Jodi Picoult’s Leaving Time, Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden, Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Will Wight’s Unsouled, Jeffrey Deaver’s The Blue Nowhere, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash are all examples of this story shape.
What kind of story did you write?
If you’ve run your manuscript through Marlowe Pro, which story archetype did it say your story most closely resembled? In the video embedded at the top, Authors A.I. CEO Alessandra Torre spends 3 ½ minutes dissecting the narrative arc section in detail. Of particular interest is not just the story shape but its tone as well. Marlowe measures the emotional temperature of your story as the main characters confront challenges and overcome them (or not).
Pro tip: Many authors don’t stick with one kind of archetype for their books, so don’t worry if you find that you’ve used different archetypes for your past works. But you may want to read other novels with the same story archetype to get a better feeling for their high-level rhythms and storytelling patterns.
If you’re wondering how to rewrite your plot to resemble classic storytelling patterns — don’t. Rather, absorb Marlowe’s analysis and make sure you’ve generally hit on the right notes that tap into our shared human experiences within the framework for your story you’ve written, making it resonate more deeply with readers.
As Jockers told me when I originally wrote about this topic in 2021: “It’s important to keep in mind there is no one single ‘correct’ way to write a novel. Don’t become paralyzed with fear because your story doesn’t seem to match one of these story shapes. It’s important to look at story shapes not as formulas to copy but as storytelling guideposts to help keep the big picture in mind when writing your story.”
Have questions about any of this? Join the conversation in the Authors A.I. Facebook group — or get started with Marlowe Pro.
