Once upon a time (OUAT is the usual beginning of a story... so I had put that in) Kurt Vonnegut Jr. gave a talk about typical stories, that are inherently appealing: The B-E axis (beginning to end) is the time axis which is horizontal. The vertical axis is Good fortune/happiness/ etc.. for the protagonist. The story starts at some point in the vertical axis (good, not too bad, so-so, not too good, and rather terrible), Vonnegut calls it Good Fortune ===ILL fortune, and the story goes along tracing the fortune from B (beginning) to E (end) of some time. Take a look at the examples in the video. Are certain familiar narrative arcs inherently appealing? | Aeon Videos There is one pattern of the story, that is pretty much a horizonal story from the beginning to the end. I once saw a movie like that too. It was called "My Dinner with Andre". Two guys meet at a restaurant, and talk. Their conversation was the whole movie. What other trajectories could be possible ?
Two guys meet at a diner . At the same time a young couple plan to rob the place . The story progresses quite a bit from there ! That’s Pulp Fiction and the awesomeness of Tarantino for you !
@Nonya Ahoy! The Greeks were procrustean in their formulation of the law of unity to depict every form of drama. unity of action: a play should have one action that it follows, with minimal subplots. unity of time: the action in a play should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours. unity of place: a play should exist in a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography, nor should the stage represent more than one place. The graph would have been an ascending (comedy) or descending (tragedy) line and not a sinusoidal curve. Enter the French and English years later who twisted such artwork of a gentle line into a ruthless curve with their then avante-garde writing. Later, Leo Tolstoy and JRR Tolkien and George RR Martin branched that main line into spoke-hub plots over a period of 24 years with characters and geographical locations that defied Einstein's spacetime theories. Before Sunrise and Moonrise Kingdom are movies which have horizontal narratives. Wes Anderson is renowned for his flat storylines. The story seemingly is not arched anywhere though curves are the fashion of the day. They travel a straight and uncomplicated path. A full circle? L'assassino by Elio Petri is a full circle. It starts and ends on the (0,0) coordinates. I am also fascinated with plots which take after Weierstrass function. Like that If on a winter's night a traveler by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. The plot is continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere. You think you are reading the real thing but you are only fooled by the decoy. What about Rashomon with unreliable narrators? Blimey! You cannot even draw it without the advanced 'Reimann Conjecture' on imaginary axis.
