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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

How many basic plots?

16:04 / 17.09.07

In Internet forums, in creative writing workshops, in English grad school, I have often heard people claim that there are only x number of basic plots. What's funny is that no one agrees on the number. A guy named Georges Polti wrote a book about the thirty-six basic plots. I know an English professor who says there are only two basic plots ("Boy leaves home" and "A stranger comes to town"). And I've also heard there's only one basic plot: "Something happened." I think three, five, and seven are probably the most common numbers I hear. So, my question: How many basic plots do you think there are? What do you mean by "basic plot"?

Just thinking it through in words for myself, here, but I think that first off you need to distinguish plot from premise. So, two people having the same premise, "Plague wipes out every man on earth but one," is not the same as two people having the same plot. But two people writing about a "bald, freedom fighting stranger meeting a 'chosen one' and initiating him into the mysteries of a world he's never known about" could be said to have the same plot, even if the premises are wildly different. But the question is, then, how much can you strip away before a plot is basic? Replace "bald freedom fighting stranger" with "new girl in town," and it's still basically the same plot. Replace "chosen one" with "introverted boy" and you haven't changed much either, structurally. But is "Bridge to Teribithia" really the same plot as "The Matrix" and "The Invisibles"? Somehow I don't think so. In what way is this a useful distinction? Is it useful to talk about "basic plots" at all? My suspicion is "no." Better to just say "Any given plot is likely to be similar to many others in its basic form, but if the details are rich enough, no one will notice or care." I don't think that I really hold with any attempt to systematize it or put a number on it, though. I guess I'd also suggest that any plot that is complex enough doesn't have an inherent basic form. The elements you strip away to try to get at what's "basic" are artistic choices in themselves, working from an artificial idea of what "basic" consists of.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

16:39 / 17.09.07

I'll get back to this, but it's telling that in your first example I immediately thought of The Matrix and Star Wars, as Alec Guinness was definitely a little patchy on top.

Five minutes later, I'm starting to think of a "basic plot flowchart," which (for conventional novels) would start with, akin to the two-option professor mentioned above, start with two branches:

Main character:
- acts.
- reacts.

and then it starts bifurcating. Next step?

17:55 / 17.09.07

Italo Calvino has some neat things to say about this sort of thing in his essay "Cybernetics and Ghosts" - that stories are combinational play, that we can have (nearly) infinite permutations of stories and literature without them differing all that much from each other. (Like DNA, pretty much infinite combinations made of discrete finite parts).

Interestingly, with this idea Calvino argues that literature (real literature) could be theoretically written by machines, since they put together combinations far more efficiently than we can.

All Acting Regiment

11:04 / 18.09.07

It's a very interesting idea, although I think we also need to remember that if it's very obvious which basic plot is going on it's probably not such an enthralling read.

21:23 / 18.09.07

I'll have to look up the Calvino. SOunds interesting.

Foust is SO authentic

15:41 / 20.09.07

Either a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes into town. That's the pair one of my lit profs half jokingly suggested.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

15:45 / 20.09.07

Maybe your lit prof had just read the first post in this thread.

14:05 / 21.09.07

Of Boy leaves home/ Stranger comes to town, which category would Hamlet, Othello, Lear or Macbeth fall into?

I vaguely remember a run down of seven basic plots whihc included things like Star Crossed Lovers, The debt that must be repaid, love triangle, and some other stuff. There was an argument at the end of the piece that an eighth plot had emerged - The Indomitable Hero, which encompassed Raiders of the Lost Ark and Rocky and other thiings like that.

I'm not sure it's that useful to boil things down to that extent. It seems to be something people say in lieu of commentary about creative writing. "Of course, you all know that there are only seven basic plots, right?" It's not really helpful, and I'm inclined to think that comments that there's only one: "something happened" are kind of a sarcastic response to that level of distillation.

Maybe I'm wrong, though and being able to identify stories at their barest is useful in terms of building up your own narrative, although really I htink it's the kind of thing you pick up intuitively.

19:24 / 21.09.07

If we accept the random binary construct (there are two plots) then Hamlet has to be 'a stranger comes to town.' The town would be Denmark and the stranger is Hamlet, alienated as he is from his kingdom, his rightful place, his family , and probably his sanity.

Othello is also 'a stranger comes to town.' That one seems kind of obvious, actually. Maybe part of the brilliance of Shakespeare is that, while we assume that the stranger must be observed by another viewpoint character, Shakespeare allows the stranger center stage and forces the audience to identify his position; alienated and under siege.

King Lear... obviously 'boy leaves home.' OK, so the boy is an old man and he leaves his home by chopping it up and giving it to children who betray him.

MacBeth... I'm going to go with 'stranger comes to town.' It has been a while since I gave MacBeth a read, but I have an instinctive feeling that he's the stranger type.

If you work with the shoehorn enough I suppose you could wedge almost any work into these two categories, but I have to admit that the more I do it the less enthusiastic I feel about the stories themselves. It is just as true that all plots boil down to 'something happened' but what does that tell me about literature? Nothing.

Categorizing the number of plots is a nice trainspotting type activity, but I'd like someone to demonstrate to me something useful I can glean from the exercise.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

19:41 / 21.09.07

In theory, I think it could be useful to writers of serial fiction (comics, among other things) if you had a good grasp on say 13 basic plots; you could then say "okay, Spider-Man's going to leave his comfortable stomping ground for a while, and then we'll insert a stranger-in-town subplot, and then once that becomes main plot, we'll have a debt-to-be-paid subplot" and rotate thusly.

As a writer, it might help you at the edit stage -- determine the driving force of what you've just churned out in a rough draft and then you can hone it accordingly.

I adhere to neither of those things, but I can see the utility of them for somebody.

All Acting Regiment

16:33 / 22.09.07

It's worth observing the pure plots of various works, noting which features recur in good books (they would presumably be the strong ones and worth copying).

02:14 / 26.09.07

where did 'boy meets girl' get to??

or is literature a patriarchal conspiracy and 'girl' is the stranger??

what about sci-fi, then? 'planet blows up'... or s/f not lit?

04:34 / 26.09.07

I have my doubts about a lot of this.

I'm not sure how helpful it is to lump things together with such broad similarities. You end up missing a lot of the cultural subtleties and differences. And in an age where multiculturalism is more and more important by the second, I think that it is a slippery slope to look at things with that paradigm.

All Acting Regiment

10:03 / 26.09.07

It is rather an American Creative Writing course meme. It might be helpful for someone wanting to start writing a novel, but probably less for someone wanting ot seriously analyze literature.

11:24 / 26.09.07

John Hodgman, in his book The Areas of My Expertise, has a funny little chart laying out the 55 Basic Plots, which you get by cross-referencing the 5 basic themes (Man vs. Man, Man vs. Society, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Himself, Man vs. Cyborg), with the 11 basic situations. Or something like that.

But as for sci-fi, I think the idea applies just as well (or poorly). Planet blows up, boy leaves home.

22:37 / 26.09.07

Jesus, what about females beyond "boy meets girl"? Can we at least have a little inclusive language here? I understand people are just trotting out the old chestnuts pro forma, but it's not required, you know? Not to sound curt, I just want to point that out.

Withiel: DALI'S ROTTWEILER

02:48 / 27.09.07

Quite, tsuga carolina. I mean, we're all bright or conditioned (take your pick) enough to read "boy" as "character", or perhaps "human", but one really does have to question the validity of a literary schema that keeps using this tired convention. And if it's not a convention, it's deeply, deeply frightening. Having said that, what about, say, "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_in_Winter_%281968_film%29">The Lion In Winter(reference to film rather than play because I've not seen and therefore cannot discuss the latter)?
It's certainly not "Boy Leaves Home", "A Stranger Comes To Town", or "Man Vs" anything, unless it's, perhaps "Man vs EVERYTHING". And even so, Eleanor of Aquitane gets as much focus as Henry, and is as (un)sympathetic. I really don't think there's a basic plot for "Ageing Couple Try To Emotionally Macerate Each Other, Their Children and Bystanders While Collapsing Inside In The Face of Inevitable Entropy". That is to say, I suspect that the variety of human situations eclipses the variety of human inventiveness within a patterned spectrum. That is to say, less incoherently, that while we may think that a story of rebellion against an evil empire might be the same whether it's set in space or, say, Fascist Britain, it's not the case. The trappings as well as the basic mechanics of it inform the plot. "shoe-horn" is, if you will permit the compliment, a perfect metaphor - getting something that essentially does not fit at the essential, though malleable peripheries, to squeeze into the solid and artificial confines of a rather silly object. That is to say, a useful thought experiment in pattern seeking (though why number the plots? And why claim universality (except as a feminist critique of literature) when all the plots are "man vs"?), but what relevance to actual literature?

11:43 / 27.09.07

I suppose you could argue that Timothy Dalton's character is a stranger (he's the French one, right), and he does mess things up a bit for Anthony Hopkins's character.

05:09 / 05.10.07

i stand suitably cajoled, tsuga...

of course it was a chestnut, but yes, 'person meets person', or to not be so anthropogenic, 'sentient life-form meets sentient life-form' would each be more inclusive. still, it was/is missing from the two plot idea and i still wonder where it fits...

11:08 / 05.10.07

Not to defend the two plot idea too much--I offer this more in the spirit of demonstrating how absurd it is to reduce everything so much--but if two people meet, aren't they both strangers to begin with? So from one of their points of view, it would be "A stranger comes to town."