The Dynamical Principles of Storytelling

When considering the opening part of 1800 short stories, we find that the first dozen paragraphs of the average narrative follow an action principle as defined in arXiv:2309.06600. When the order of the paragraphs is shuffled, the average no longer exhibits this property. The findings show that there is a preferential direction we take in semantic space when starting a story, possibly related to a common Western storytelling tradition as implied by Aristotle in Poetics.

Narrative as a Dynamical System

There is increasing evidence that human activity in general, and narrative in particular, can be treated as a dynamical system in the physics sense; a system whose evolution is described by an action integral, such that the average of all possible paths from point A to point B is given by the extremum of the action. We create by construction three such paths by averaging about 500 different narratives, and we show that the average path is consistent with an action principle.