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The Details Matter

Are all stories the same?

John Yorke seems to think so, and Philip Brewer also seems to think so, and a computer also happens to think so. Personally, I don't disagree: based on the arguments and evidence that the three different authors (or entities, maybe?) present, it seems valid to argue that stories are the same at their core. The three act structure Yorke discusses seems to surround us in storytelling, and even when we incorporate some details, we're still stuck in a couple different stories that a machine has identified for us. 

But, in my view, this style of argument and distillation of ideas doesn't have a set stopping point — heck, we could argue that all stories can be boiled down to one plot point: something happens and a different thing does not happen. Does this mean that all stories are the same? Even though they share a common framework and structure, the "same" stories are still unique, and it's these differences that makes them stories that we love. 

I really loved this quote from Yorke's piece:

"Is this therefore the magic key to storytelling? Such hubris requires caution—the compulsion to order, to explain, to catalogue, is also the tendency of the train-spotter. In denying the rich variety and extraordinary multi-faceted nature of narrative, one risks becoming no better than Casaubon, the desiccated husk from Middlemarch, who turned his back on life while seeking to explain it."

Sure, stories might all be the same in their most basic structure, but the twists, turns, intricacies, and details are what separate one great story from another. There's a reason why most of us don't notice these pattern until it's pointed out to us — even when we have these basic structural concepts buried in the back of our heads, the dynamic characters and rich narrative capture our attention instead. In the analysis using Project Gutenberg, some books in a category received hundreds and thousands of downloads, while others in that same category received only a small fraction of that number — and this analysis didn't even include the books that didn't make the cut! Some of these differences might be attributed to the quality of the writing, but the story itself matters too. Even if these different novels have the "same" core structure, there's clearly a difference in the finished products with their embellishments and creative dressings.

Towards the end of her article in The Atlantic, LaFrance mentions essay contests with submissions created by AI. It's undeniably incredible that programmed machines can pick up on minor grammatical and semantic nuances and overall plot structures, but there still exists a wide difference in the quality of writing between Shakespeare and the latest program from IBM. All stories are the same at the most basic level, but the layers are what we care about as readers.

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