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Writers and scholars have long debated what makes for a great story, but Samsun Knight wanted to see whether there was a way to empirically determine which stories will be snore fests and which will leave audiences hungry for more. 

Using a scientist’s tools, the novelist and economist found that “narrative reversals,” or peripeteias, were the key factor – 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, Knight and his colleagues found that stories rich in these mechanisms boosted popularity and engagement with audiences through a range of media, from television to crowdfunding pitches.

“The best-written stories were always either ‘building up’ a current reversal, or introducing a new plot point,” says Knight, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

“In our analysis, the best writers were those that were able to maintain both many plot points and strong build-up for each plot point across the course of the narrative.”

The research, co-authored with Matthew D. Rocklage and Yakov Bart of Boston’s Northeastern University, was . 

For the study, the researchers analyzed nearly 30,000 television shows, movies, novels, and crowdfunding pitches using computational linguistics, a blend of computer science and language analysis. The approach allowed them to quantify not only the number of a reversals in a text but also their degree or intensity by assigning numerical values to words based on how positive or negative they were.

Movies and television shows with more and bigger reversals were better rated on the popular ratings site IMDb. Books with the most and biggest reversals were downloaded more than twice as often as books with the fewest reversals from the free online library Project Gutenberg. And GoFundMe pitches with more and larger reversals were as much as 39 per cent more likely to hit their fundraising goals.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle was the first to identify peripeteia as a key feature of a good story, with Oedipus Rex serving as a classic example. Other thinkers have since added their ideas, including American playwright and dramaturg Leon Katz, whose scholarship particularly inspired Knight’s research.

“[Katz] described the reversal as the basic unit of narrative – just as a sentence is the basic unit of a paragraph, or the syllogism is the basic unit of a logical proof,” Knight says.

In addition to helping psychologists understand how narrative works to educate, inform and inspire people, the findings may also benefit storytellers of all kinds.

“Hopefully our research can help build a pedagogy for writers that allows them to rely on the accumulated knowledge of Aristotle et al. without having to reinvent the wheel on their own every time,” says Knight.

That includes himself. With another novel on the way, he was recently working on a chapter with a big reveal.

“I realized that this drop might hit harder if I gave the character more positive moments before pulling the rug out from under them.”