8. Quantifying the effectiveness of a narrative

As I mentioned briefly in the first chapter, I adapted the ABT from “The Rule of Replacing” that I heard from the co-creators of the animated series South Park. Their basic observation for editing a script is, “Every time you replace an AND with a BUT or a THEREFORE, the storytelling gets better.”

I got to thinking in the summer of 2015 that if you took a given text and removed some ANDs and replaced them with BUTs (let’s skip the THEREFOREs for now), you would end up with a simple metric. It would be the BUTs-to-ANDs ratio, which you could calculate before and after altering the text.

If you did this, the “after” value would be greater than the “before” value. And as we’ve said, we know that the “after” material is stronger storytelling—meaning greater narrative strength.

So this then becomes our index. The greater the Narrative Index value (the higher the BUT-to-AND ratio), the greater the story strength of the material. Also, to make it a whole number instead of a fraction, we multiply it by 100.

Which means the Narrative Index is this:

NARRATIVE INDEX = (BUTs/ANDs) X 100