Narrative twists or turns of fate that take characters from highs to lows and vice versa are a good indicator of the success of a film, television series or book, say marketing researchers at Northeastern University.
There are very few universal truths about humanity, but one thing is certain: we love stories.
Whether it’s movies, TV shows, books, political campaigns, or even advertisements, people are constantly told stories every day, or they tell them themselves. Entire industries are built on storytelling and understanding which stories resonate with people the most.
For this reason, a group of researchers at Northeastern University tried to crack the code and answer one question: What makes a story successful?
“If you watch ‘Mad Men,’ you realize it’s more of an art form. You have an inspiration about how to tell a beautiful story, and then everything falls into place and it works like magic,” says Yakov Bart, a professor of marketing at Northeastern University. “But lately, a lot of people are thinking that maybe it’s not just art — maybe there’s a scientific component to it.”
By applying advanced quantitative analysis and statistical techniques to tens of thousands of movies, television shows, books, and even fundraisers, researchers discovered a core element of storytelling that helped predict a story’s success with audiences: narrative twists.
Most people know what a narrative reversal is, even if they don’t know the name. Something goes well for a character – Romeo falls in love with Juliet – but then something bad happens to that character – Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin, is angry and tries to kill Romeo. Or a character is depressed and has a positive experience that changes everything for the better.
“We’re using these advanced text analysis techniques to develop a way to quantify and measure the frequency and intensity of narrative reversals in a variety of narrative contexts,” says Samsun Knight, a research fellow at Northeastern University’s DATA Initiative and published author. “We’re showing that it can actually predict which stories tend to be more successful. This is true even when you look at which episodes of a particular TV show are more successful.”
The researchers analyzed 30,000 pieces of text from TV shows, movies, books, and fundraising appeals, analyzing them based on how positive or negative the language was in a particular section. From this, they were able to measure how well the characters in a particular story were doing and when that situation changed or reversed.
They counted the number of backlashes that occurred in each story, and also measured the frequency and intensity of each backlash, finding that this is a pretty accurate indicator of how well a story resonates with people. In this case, that meant the ratings of a movie or TV show on IMDb, how many times people downloaded a book, and how much money a fundraiser raised.
“It’s not the only factor that determines the success of a story, but we were impressed by its consistency and the fact that it’s so simple,” says Matt Rocklage, assistant professor of marketing at Northeastern University. “The more of these reversals there are, the more successful these stories are, and the bigger these reversals are, the more successful these stories are.”
Knight says this research isn’t intended to develop a formula for how writers should tell stories, but he hopes it can help them avoid simple pitfalls when conceiving their story.
“Intuitively, people tend not to respond to places where things are neither getting better nor worse,” Knight says. “You don’t want those low points in your story. … I love Samuel Beckett – there are exceptions to every rule – but generally speaking, this kind of unity of narrative advancement is extremely important. Leon Katz, a well-known dramaturgist at the Yale School of Drama, called such narrative reversals the ‘formal unity’ of the plot. Just as paragraphs are made up of sentences, a plot tends to be made up of reversals.”
Beyond people wanting to write the next Oscar-winning screenplay or best-selling novel, Knight says this research shows that narrative inversions can be a useful tool in more practical contexts, too. If you’re writing a cover letter for your dream job or crafting a fundraising pitch to sell people on your business concept, you should “tell it like a story,” with all the inversions, Knight says.
“Tell us where the setback occurred, where you actually need to ask for help now, or tell us where things might come back up if you got that help,” Knight says. “Structuring your communications with this rule of thumb in mind can help get your point across and engage people more successfully.”
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