In my last post I committed the next year to researching what I describe as the geometry of story. Today I lay out that research by following the money to history’s greatest writers.
The goal is to ascertain if there is indeed a geometry of story and to see what we can learn from the hidden patterns left by the best storytellers. How will we do this?
We must try to give some detached, objective measures by which to pursue this research. That’s why I’ll base my research on the storytellers that attract the most capital. Reading takes up a lot of time, so there is something authentic about people spending money to willingly devote hours to a narrative.
Wikipedia provides a list of history’s best-selling fiction authors. The problem with this, however, is it is only concerned with gross estimated sales of each author. But that doesn’t necessarily lead to the best storytellers. If you wrote over 700 books, as British romance writer Barbara Cartland did, you too might make the list.
Instead, I crunched the data and devised a capital flow analysis of the best authors. Much like economists analyze economies of a per capita basis, I analyzed the authors on a per book basis. This made the list look quite different from what you see on Wikipedia and is a more accurate depiction of the most masterful storytellers.
I’ve made a few adjustments to the list. Shakespeare would have been on it, but I left him out for a few reasons. For one, he’s been analyzed to death. Two, I wanted to focus on books, not plays. Thirdly, I have research ideas further down the road that may include him.
Two other adjustments. Believe it or not Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and Chinese writer Jin Yong would have made this list. I left Pushkin off because he’s a poet and I wanted to keep it to authors. I left Yong off because English translations of his novels are hard to come by and I feel better equipped to analyze writers west of Moscow.
That being said, I find this to be a fascinating list. I’ve never read anything from any of them. The closest to my literary taste would be Tolstoy, but I never quite got around to him. On a personal level, I’m happy to rise above my literary snobbery and explore authors I never would otherwise have read. I’ve spent most of my life with central and eastern European writers, along with America’s Hemingway.
The research will involve reading one book from each author. So how to choose their “best” book?
I chose each author’s best book based on the highest average customer rating from Amazon. While not entirely scientific, it does take my own personal bias out of the equation. I did have to make one adjustment in regards to Leo Tolstoy. The obvious choice would have been War and Peace or Anna Karenina, but as Milan Kundera once said, “reading is long and life is short”. I want to finish this research in a timely manner, so instead I choseThe Death of Ivan Illyich. Beside, it got the same number of stars on Amazon so it’s in keeping with the overall methodology.
But we don’t have to quibble too much about which book we choose. What’s really important is the first list — the author’s themselves. We are focusing on authors who have consistently reproduced their success. The ability to duplicate success in storytelling implies some kind of formula, whether conscious or subconscious. We are looking for the fingerprints they left behind. Authors with this level success will have those fingerprints on more than just one book, so I’m confident we have a good starting point.
So how will I measure the geometry of story?
This may sound dull to you: I’m going to count.
More precisely, I’m going to count the number of turning points per X number of pages. I define “turning point” as when a story turns direction. It could be a key piece of information unveiled to a character that alters the direction of action, or an event that alters the course of their fate. A turning point moves the story forward. Ken Follett, best-selling author of Pillars of the Earth, says “There is a rule which says that the story should turn about ever four to six pages.” I want to go deeper into that, quantify it, and see if there is a geometry most conductive to better stories.
I want to know not only how many turning points there are per given area, but also the nature of their rhythm and regularity. There will probably be graphs involved.
As I said in my previous post, story is information travelling in space and time. If all the notes of a symphony were played in a single second, it would be noise. But when a certain distance is placed between the notes it becomes beautiful music. For 2500 years, ever since Pythagoras discovered the laws of harmonics by walking past a blacksmith and noticing the different pitches of various hammers pounding the anvil, geometry has a remarkable track record of explaining our universe.
A century or two later Aristotle questioned how, if the earth was indeed flat, could ships vanish over the horizon hull first. Some twenty-three centuries later a man by the name of Albert Einstein discovered that space itself was curved, making way for his theory of relativity. Geometry quantifies the universe. Why not story?
As I map each story I will also observe how I feel during the reading. What points elicit a big emotional reaction? When do I tune out? This will be particularly helpful at the end when I compare the effectiveness of each author. Furthermore, I’ll be able to make those qualitative observations within a quantitative framework.
My hypotheses is that there is indeed a geometry of story. If we can quantify it, I’d venture a guess that it will be applicable to any medium (book, film, public speaking) and any length of story (feature film to short video). But we’ll see.
I’ll analyze the first book by end of January and aim to do one book a month for the remainder of the 2014. (Too slow? Hey, I do work for a living).
Older:The Geometry of Story
Geometry of Story 