From Harry Potter and Romeo and Juliet to the stories of Oedipus and Icarus, almost every tale told conforms to one of just six plots, researchers have claimed.
A major new analysis of over 1,700 stories identified the core plots ‘which form the building blocks of complex narratives’.
Researchers used complex data-mining to locate words linked to positive or negative emotion in each story to reveal the set of arcs.
An emotional arc is similar to a plot building block that tells a story by generating an emotional response from the reader, reports MIT Review.
