When considering the opening part of 1800 short stories, we find that the first dozen paragraphs of the average narrative follow an action principle as defined in arXiv:2309.06600. When the order of the paragraphs is shuffled, the average no longer exhibits this property. The findings show that there is a preferential direction we take in semantic space when starting a story, possibly related to a common Western storytelling tradition as implied by Aristotle in Poetics.

翻译：通过分析1800篇短篇小说的开篇部分，我们发现普通叙事的前十二个段落遵循arXiv:2309.0660中定义的动作原则。当段落顺序被打乱时，这种性质的平均表现不再存在。研究结果表明，在开启故事时，我们倾向于在语义空间中沿特定方向行进，这可能与亚里士多德在《诗学》中暗示的西方常见叙事传统相关。