Data Analysis of Novels Reveals... Nothing New — Electric Literature

Earlier this year, I wrote about one of my creative writing pet peeves: the constant attempts to reduce all forms of art into a few simple categories. You know the idea, how "all stories" are one of ten or six or three or eight types of possible stories: These self-congratulatory attempts to reduce art to formula rarely tell us anything useful about stories. These formulas don't tell us how stories function or how different narratives affect readers. They don't tell us how great stories were written or what meanings the works can produce. Instead, these essentialist structures are parlor tricks that exploit the need for all mysteries to have simple explanations. But what the critic is invariably doing is generalizing to the point of nonsense.