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Emotional Story Arc

Finally, we use linguistic sentiment-analysis to score each word according to its latent positive and negative emotions. When we add those numbers up, across the entire book, you can actually see the shape of the story emerge.

When the characters experience conflict, pain, and sadness, the chart goes down. When the characters are happy and content, or when their conflicts resolve, the chart climbs back up again.

For example, here痴 a sentiment analysis chart for The Hobbit, with the one of the final sections of the book selected (containing the emotional low-point of the story). The blue bar represents the number of positive emotional words in the chapter, and the red bar shows the number of negative words. Below the chart, we can see a word-cloud with the actual positive and negative words from the corresponding selection. You can click around on any of the bars to see the emotionally-charged words within the corresponding section of the story.



This incredible tool shows you how the individual word-choices that you make as an author contribute to the shape of the story arc you池e building. These techniques were originally developed by computational linguists at the UVM Computational Story Lab, and now for the first time, they池e available to authors in the general public.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Sham bam bamina! posted:

This Wanderer guy sounds badass.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

I am tempted to see if the "emotional story arc" algorithm ends up telling me 1984 has a happy ending

Guy A. Person posted:

According to this algorithm there are 60% positive words with half of those being strongly positive so I think you know the answer

Mel Mudkiper posted:

chernobyl kinsman posted:

tag yourself im Skeet Creek

Franchescanado posted:

Growing up, the people I knew that wrote fantasy and sci-fi stories tended to have an over-active imagination--dragons that shoot lasers made up of rainbow fragments, robot dolphins with eyes that turn into swords--that needed to be toned down and have consistent logic. Now it seems that wanna-be fantasy and sci-fi writers struggle with how to give their character a potion or describe a forest. I am constantly baffled that there are so many people that want to write extravagant genre fiction but have the imagination of a squirrel with cognitive disorders and need computer programs to tell them how to make a back story for their characters.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

I'm writing a review of Joe Abercrombie's terrible books for example, and it's very obvious that Abercrombie is writing about aristocracy, military life, colonial politics, and secret police without any familiarity with them outside of fiction, and the genre fantasy elements are there because genre fantasy demands them, not because they serve an interesting artistic purpose.

Randy Marsh posted:

I love how the books are self aware and turn a lot of the fantasy tropes on their heads, such as Bayaz not at all being who he seems, if you go in thinking of him as the typical old wizard who guides the "heroes".

Smashurbanipal posted:

From his own descriptions of "Heroes", that's pretty much Abercrombie's point: everyone is kinda reprehensible and there is absolutely no "good" faction or person. It's all shades of vicious, vindictive, vain and other wise unappealing traits that are written so successfully that you can't help but empathize with the characters.

Glokta is the perfect example of this

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Actually, his works are dark and unflinchingly mature.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Actually, his works are dark and unflinchingly mature.

Tree Goat posted:

i知 reading a journal of the plague year

Burning Rain posted:

I get the feeling BotL was actually talking about something else entirely.

At least partly, because it seems weird to criticize something for being based in tropes rather than reality if the work is explicitly set within and is about these tropes.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

I'm writing a review of Joe Abercrombie's terrible books for example, and it's very obvious that Abercrombie is writing about aristocracy, military life, colonial politics, and secret police without any familiarity with them outside of fiction, and the genre fantasy elements are there because genre fantasy demands them, not because they serve an interesting artistic purpose.

Jack Vance posted:

Gersen entered a hall with a floor of immaculate white glass tiles. On one hand was the display wall, characteristic of middle-class European homes; here hung a panel intricately inlaid with wood, bone and shell: Lenka workmanship from Nowhere, one of the Concourse planets; a set of perfume points from Pamfile; a rectangle of polished and perforated obsidian; and one of the so-called "supplication slabs"* from Lupus 23II.



* The nonhuman natives of Peninsula 4A, Lupus 23II, devote the greater part of their lives to the working of these slabs, which apparently have a religious significance. Twice each year, at the solstices, two hundred and twenty-four microscopically exact slabs are placed aboard a ceremonial barge, which is then allowed to drift out upon the ocean. The Lupus Salvage Company maintains a ship just over the horizon from peninsula 4A. As soon as the raft has drifted out of sight of land, it is recovered, the slabs are removed, exported and sold as objets d'art.

david crosby posted:

Sham bam bamina! posted:

I didn't read it before, but now I've read it, and I think it's extremely good. Want to find out more about Talbeg script and the Wound.

quote:

Spangled tapestry swayed between the uprights; camouflage-net, meshed with the plunging star-draught.

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he handled his small black book as children do their favourite dolls, who would impute to them a certain personality; he seemed to speak to the turned leaves, and to get his answer.

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The exact disposition of small things末the precise shapes of trees, the tilt of a bucket, the movement of a straw, the disappearing right boot of Sergeant Snell末registered not by the ear nor any single faculty末an on-rushing pervasion, saturating all existence; with exactitude, logarithmic, dial-timed, millesimal末of calculated velocity, some mean chemist's contrivance, a stinking physicist's destroying toy.

quote:

Cloying drift-damp cupped in every concave place.
It hurts you in the bloody eyes, it grips chill and harmfully and rasps the sensed membrane of the throat; it's raw cold, it makes you sneeze末christ how cold it is.