The Dynamical Principles of Storytelling
This work addresses the problem of understanding narrative structure in storytelling for researchers in computational linguistics or literary analysis, but it is incremental as it builds on prior principles.
The study analyzed the first dozen paragraphs of 1800 short stories and found that they follow an action principle, which disappears when paragraphs are shuffled, indicating a preferential direction in semantic space for story openings linked to Western storytelling traditions.
When considering the opening part of 1800 short stories, we find that the first dozen paragraphs of the average narrative follow an action principle as defined in arXiv:2309.06600. When the order of the paragraphs is shuffled, the average no longer exhibits this property. The findings show that there is a preferential direction we take in semantic space when starting a story, possibly related to a common Western storytelling tradition as implied by Aristotle in Poetics.