I just found this article while stumbling around the Internet. I suppose if they'd said there are six story shapes, I'd have to agree. But six plots? I'm not sure they've got the terminology down. What do you think? http://gizmodo.com/data-analysis-suggests-there-exist-only-six-book-plots-1783263768
One of those stupid soundbites that doesn't mean anything. If you reduce all of literature enough you could come up with one "plot" but what would that teach us about writing the next good book? Nothing.
Ha, jokes on them, my book is fall-rise-fall-flat line for a bit-fall suddenly and terribly. Don't see that listed there! But seriously, trying to group things is an annoying thing that humans like to do, even when things also have vastly different qualities. I agree with @jannert that you group anything any way you like and you have found nothing except what you expected to find.
I agree, except this wasn't just a sound bite. It was a full-blown scientific study with linguists and everything... or maybe it was physicists because they got it completely wrong. Also, I think they got the idea from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s story shapes video which he did as a humorous way to illustrate storytelling. And they only ventured into the field of storytelling because Sheldon Cooper once said that physicists understand everything. Apparently, he was just full of himself.
Unless we're talking about dark matter or dark energy. Then it's highly unlikely we'll find anything we're looking for because we're looking in the wrong place. One scientist said the current experiments designed to find dark matter/energy are like a drunk looking for lost car keys under the nearest street lamp because he won't have a hope of finding anything in the dark patches.
I recently learned that honeybees can count, but only to four. I wonder if some of the "dark matter / dark energy" things might (might, not probably are) actually beyond our capability to comprehend. Since we're the intellectual high point of life on Earth to date, we often think that somehow, someday, we'll be able to figure it all out, but this might not be true.
And it might be particularly true in the case of dark matter/energy. I'm come to wonder if the universe isn't like the surface of a pond. Things bubble up from below (dark matter/energy) to create bubbles (stars, etc.) on the surface. And none of our instruments can work (or even see) below the surface.
My understanding is that there is only 6 or 7 basic narratives that all lierature follows. It seems small but that is just boiling stories down to their core. The sheer amount of work out there shows just how many ways these narratives can be worked and combined to create a near unlimited number of new and original stories. All literature is connected any way so in a way nobody will write anything new and everything written is original because it is a different take on something. I found that hard to take at first but after a while it became quite liberating because there is no pressure to be original any mor. Now I can just worry about telling a story my way, whether its been done before or not.
I read the Christopher Booker book - The Seven Basic plots - it was interesting. Not that far a stretch from what I believe that most fiction is connected no matter than genre. All elements can be boiled down to the characters journey.
That all really depends on how you describe the particular plots. Even then, based on what I've seen here, not only did they forget "Falling Flat" but they also seemed to write this assuming plots are all consistent in pacing, or the rising/falling of conflicts/other such arcs. I mean, there can be something with a rise, a sudden flat-falling, gradually rising, dropping again, and just rising. Separating books into 3 "acts" that represent rising or falling of conflicts/action isn't really an effective way to go about graphing "how many plots exist."
My latest theory... There is an infinite number of plots, but we only have seven ways to categorize them.