Concept
Story shape
You might say: emotional arc, shape of a story
The rise and fall of fortune across a story. A study of 1,327 Project Gutenberg stories found six basic shapes.
- What it does
- Lets you see the whole book’s emotional curve at once and choose where it turns.
- Ask
- Where is the lowest point, and where does fortune turn?
- Trouble
- The line stays flat: nothing gets much better or much worse.
Catalogue: Shape
- Rags to riches: A steady rise.
- Tragedy (riches to rags): A steady fall.
- Man in a hole: A fall, then a rise: get into trouble, then get out. The Last Hour has this shape. A fall in fortune followed by a rise defines it, whatever the story is about; no man or hole is needed.
- Icarus: A rise, then a fall.
- Cinderella: Rise, fall, rise.
- Oedipus: Fall, rise, fall.
Sources
- Andrew J. Reagan et al., “The Emotional Arcs of Stories Are Dominated by Six Basic Shapes”, pp. 1–5, 10
we find a set of six core emotional arcs which form the essential building blocks of complex emotional trajectories
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Story shape" (story-shape) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/fiction-writing/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal