Narrative Pattern Recognition

topic

Narrative pattern recognition is the internalized library of story structures — Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, Aristotelian three-act structure, the seven basic plots identified by Christopher Booker, the narrative archetypes of different cultural traditions — that enables the creative practitioner to perceive what story a situation is telling, which narrative pattern a sequence of events is instantiating, and what the narrative logic of a situation implies about the structure of what has come before and what is likely to come next.

Role

Narrative pattern recognition is the creative capacity that enables both the making of stories and the reading of situations as stories — with the highly creative person perceiving the narrative structure in events that most people experience as disconnected, and using that structural perception both to understand what is happening and to communicate it in forms that resonate with audiences' deep narrative intelligence. The journalist who can perceive that a complex policy situation is instantiating the classic 'unintended consequences' narrative, the organizational consultant who can see that a company's crisis is following the 'disruption of the incumbent' narrative arc, and the novelist who can feel that their story has the structural shape of a specific mythological pattern all share the narrative pattern recognition that converts raw material into resonant creative work.

Explore "Narrative Pattern Recognition" on the interactive map →