"The words shifted towards the beginning of a story tend to describe a setting: “The story opens on the protagonist,...

"The words shifted towards the beginning of a story tend to describe a setting: “The story opens on the protagonist, a wealthy young 19th century student recently graduated from the fictional University College in Los Angeles, California.”. Most are therefore nouns and adjectives that can be used to specify and describe a person, location, or time period.

In contrast, the words shifted towards the end of a story are packed with excitement! There are a few housekeeping terms you’d expect to find at the end of a plot description (“ending”, “final”), but also a number of verbs suggestive of a climax. “The hero shoots the villain and rushes to the heroine, and apologizes. The two reunited, they kiss.”

"In short, if we had to summarize the average story that humans tell, it would go something like Things get worse and worse until at the last minute they get better."

http://varianceexplained.org/r/tidytext-plots/ ⟲

Examining the arc of 100,000 stories: a tidy analysis

I recently came across a great natural language dataset from Mark Riedel: 112,000 plots of stories downloaded from English language Wikipedia. This includes books, movies, TV episodes, video games- anything that has a Plot section on a Wikipedia page.