All the books and movies in the world are just 6 basic stories

A 2016 study analyzed over 1000 works of fiction and noted that they all fit into just 6 basic narrative patterns: rags to riches, riches to rags, the man in the hole, Icarus, Cinderella, and Oedipus.

If a novel or movie seems strangely familiar to you, there may be a scientific explanation. An extensive computational study of more than 1,700 works of fiction in English found that almost all stories fall into one of just six fundamental emotional arcs.

The 2016 study, conducted by the University of Vermont’s Computational Narrative Lab, suggests that despite the diversity of literature, the emotional rhythms underlying narratives are surprisingly consistent.

To uncover these patterns, researchers analyzed 1,737 books from Project Gutenberg, a public domain digital library. Using sentiment analysis, they divided each text into 10,000-word segments and measured the emotional tone of each section based on language. Words like “poverty”, “death” and “punishment” lowered the emotional score of a story, while terms like “love,” “peace,” and “friend” raised it.

By mapping sentiment swings across thousands of stories, the team identified six archetypal emotional trajectories. These narrative arcs, they say, form the “building blocks of complex narratives” and appear repeatedly in classic and modern works of fiction. The six main arcs are:

• From poverty to riches: a constant emotional rise, as seen in Alice in Wonderland.
• From riches to poverty (Tragedy): a continuous downward trajectory, like Romeo and Juliet.
• The man in the hole: a fall followed by a rise.
• Icarus: a rise followed by a fall.
• Cinderella: a rise-fall-rise pattern.
• Oedipus: a fall-rise-fall structure.

Interestingly, the study also found a link between emotional complexity and popularity. Based on data from Project Gutenberg downloads, stories that utilize more intricate narrative arcs, especially patterns of Cinderella and Oedipus, tend to attract more readers. Books that combine multiple narrative arcs, like consecutive “Man in the Hole” sequences or a Cinderella twist that ends in tragedy, also stand out.

Researchers highlight that emotional arcs are not the same as plots. His model focuses exclusively on the feeling expressed in language, and not on characters, events or themes. “The emotional arc of a story does not give us direct information about the plot,” the authors note, but it reveals the patterns present throughout the narrative.

Although the research was based on works in English, the pattern can be seen in Stories produced in several other languages. According to , the classic Modame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, fits into the riches-to-rags pattern. The tale of the Ugly Duckling, by Hans Christian Andersen, is much more complex and with ups and downs, mixing two arcs of the man in a hole within a general narrative from rags to riches.

For those curious about why stories feel so familiar, the answer may lie in these ancient emotional models that continue to shape the stories we tell.