Fresh insights into plot have recently become available thanks to the arrival of ‘big data’. One compelling analysis of story structure was carried out by publishing executive Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers of Stanford University’s Literary Lab, whose algorithm was set to work on 20,000 novels and taught itself to predict a New York Times bestseller with an accuracy of 80 per cent. Fascinatingly, the resulting data supported the life’s work of Christopher Booker, whose seven basic plots did, indeed, emerge. What also emerged was an indication of what people are most curious to read about.
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