Since at least Aristotle, writers and scholars have debated what makes for a great story. One of them is Samsun Knight, a novelist who is also an economist and assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. With a scientist’s tools, he’s done what previous theorizers have failed to: put theory to the test and demonstrated the key factor for empirically predicting which stories will be snore fests and which will leave audiences hungry for more.
Since at least Aristotle, writers and scholars have debated what makes for a great story. One of them is Samsun Knight, a novelist who is also an economist and assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. With a scientist’s tools, he’s done what previous theorizers have failed to: put theory to the test and demonstrated the key factor for empirically predicting which stories will be snore fests and which will leave audiences hungry for more.
The work is published in the journal Science Advances.
It turns out to be “narrative reversals”—lots of them and the bigger the better. Commonly known as changes of fortune or turning points, where characters’ fortunes swing from good to bad and vice versa, Prof.
