Where do words appear in novels?

Craft of Fiction
#1

I saw this shared on Facebook – it’s very interesting: “Distributions of words across narrative time in 27,266 novels”

https://litlab.stanford.edu/distributions-of-words-27k-novels/

“Athletic” – along with a great many words used to describe people, as we’ll see shortly – concentrates really strongly at the beginning of the novel, where characters are getting introduced for the first time. If someone is athletic, it tends to get mentioned the first time they appear, not the second or third or last.

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#2

Rue the day that writing is reduced to a science …

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#3

Love this one. One could write a piece following the words frequency displayed on the graphs at the end of the article.

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#4

You are so right. Loved all the graphs at the end. I was actually smiling at the groupings of words that spiked at the ends of stories in a similar formation I felt I knew if it was say a romance or detective novel, like a mold for the story,just from the visual shape of their selected word placement.

It also occured to me that this was a map of what readers like to see and when in the body of a novel, because clearly these are all books that are out there in the world to be able to be examined. With books having similar graph shapes it just speaks volumes about what it means to have a story follow a certain outline or pace to be well received. Like a mind map of what works for the reader, and therefore works for the writer in the successful reception of their novel.

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