Basic Plot

[maestrowork]

I just got this from an email. So discuss....


I once read a quotation along the lines that there are only seven basic story lines, and that all the stories in the world can be seen as permutations of those seven. Do you know: (a) Who said/wrote it? (b) What the exact quotation is (including the descriptions of the basic story lines)? --Julian Maynard-Smith, Antibes, France

Dear Julian:

Seven? Come on. Pick any integer from one to a hundred and you can probably find somebody arguing that that's how many basic plots there are. A few minutes of browsing produced the following sampling, based in part on a breakdown from the Internet Public Library
(www.ipl.org/ref/QUE/FARQ/plotFARQ.html):

Sixty-nine. Attributed to Rudyard Kipling by Ronald Tobias (see below).
Tobias is mum on what the 69 plots were, but on the assumption that half were variations on Taking Up the White Man's Burden, I'd say this is one we can safely pass by.

Thirty-six. Attributed to Carlo Gozzi and reprised by Georges Polti in The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (1917). Polti's somewhat daft exegesis states stating that there are precisely 36 emotions, which in some unclear manner are tied to the 36 situations. Nonetheless, many of his story lines unquestionably are timeless locomotives of plot, for example, Situation III, Crime Pursued by Vengeance--Charles Bronson's career in a nutshell. Or Situation XV, Murderous Adultery, which pretty much sums up Fatal Attraction. Others have a decidedly musty air, such as Situation XXXI, Conflict With a God, or XX, Self-Sacrificing for an Ideal. Not in this day and age, unless your ideal is Getting Vested in the Pension Plan.

Twenty. From 20 Master Plots (And How to Build Them) by Ronald Tobias (1993). Tobias doesn't claim these are the only plots, merely 20 serviceable ones. However, on going down the extremely generic list (Adventure, Revenge, Love, Rivalry, Escape, etc.), one thinks: for this I need a book?

Seven. The Internet Public Library quotes a list of seven plots (man versus nature, man versus man, etc.) that someone claims to remember from second grade. Not the most authoritative source, but no flakier than any of these other systems.

Three. From The Basic Patterns of Plot by William Foster-Harris (1959). Not one to be distracted by unnecessary detail, F-H divines three basic plots:
(1) happy ending, (2) unhappy ending, and (3) the "literary" plot, "in which the whole plot is done backwards [and] the story winds up in futility and unhappiness." Examples of literary plots are drawn from Joyce, Pirandello, and other highfalutin types for whom F-H obviously has no use.

Two. Tobias concedes that his 20 plots boil down to 2, "plots of the body"
and "plots of the mind." Plots of the body are your action flicks, full of sound and fury, not necessarily signifying anything. Plots of the mind are more cerebral and often involve "searching for some kind of meaning," which sounds dangerously like the literary plot disdained by Foster-Harris.

One. One school of thought holds that all stories can be summed up as Exposition/Rising Action/Climax/Falling Action/Denouement or to simplify it even further, Stuff Happens, although even at this level of generality we seem to have left out Proust.

See, this is the problem I have with all these schemata--first, no taxonomy can encompass everything in literature, and second, they don't tell you anything beyond the obvious. A more useful approach would be to abandon the chimera of universality and focus on what works today. By this light it seems to me that the most useful divide is: Everybody Gets Killed (or at least the hero[ine] does, e.g., Hamlet, Thelma & Louise, Romeo and Juliet, The Wild Bunch, American Beauty, etc.) versus Only the Bad Guys Get Killed (the collected works of Spielberg, Lucas, et al.). The former leaves you thinking life sucks, whereas the latter has everybody walking out of the theater with a smile. Naturally one can come up with numerous subdivisions, such as the one exemplified by Disney animated features, i.e., The Bad Guy Gets Killed but by Accident. In the odd case no one gets killed, but this is mostly in works by sensitive lady writers that seldom earn back the advance and even so usually have someone dying of cancer or in some other tragic manner (e.g., Terms of Endearment, Fried Green Tomatoes--come to think of it, someone did get killed in the latter. See what I'm saying?).

Now throw in the sizable genre of stories that may be characterized as The Protagonists Angle to Get One Another in the Sack and we begin to get a handle on the situation. My point is, never mind the 36, 20, 7, or whatever basic plots--take out sex, violence, and death and you lose 90 percent of literature right there.

[Jamesaritchie]

I just got this from an email. So discuss....


I once read a quotation along the lines that there are only seven basic story lines, and that all the stories in the world can be seen as permutations of those seven. Do you know: (a) Who said/wrote it? (b) What the exact quotation is (including the descriptions of the basic story lines)? --Julian Maynard-Smith, Antibes, France

Dear Julian:

Seven? Come on. Pick any integer from one to a hundred and you can probably find somebody arguing that that's how many basic plots there are. A few minutes of browsing produced the following sampling, based in part on a breakdown from the Internet Public Library
(www.ipl.org/ref/QUE/FARQ/plotFARQ.html (http://www.ipl.org/ref/QUE/FARQ/plotFARQ.html)):

Sixty-nine. Attributed to Rudyard Kipling by Ronald Tobias (see below).
Tobias is mum on what the 69 plots were, but on the assumption that half were variations on Taking Up the White Man's Burden, I'd say this is one we can safely pass by.

Thirty-six. Attributed to Carlo Gozzi and reprised by Georges Polti in The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (1917). Polti's somewhat daft exegesis states stating that there are precisely 36 emotions, which in some unclear manner are tied to the 36 situations. Nonetheless, many of his story lines unquestionably are timeless locomotives of plot, for example, Situation III, Crime Pursued by Vengeance--Charles Bronson's career in a nutshell. Or Situation XV, Murderous Adultery, which pretty much sums up Fatal Attraction. Others have a decidedly musty air, such as Situation XXXI, Conflict With a God, or XX, Self-Sacrificing for an Ideal. Not in this day and age, unless your ideal is Getting Vested in the Pension Plan.

Twenty. From 20 Master Plots (And How to Build Them) by Ronald Tobias (1993). Tobias doesn't claim these are the only plots, merely 20 serviceable ones. However, on going down the extremely generic list (Adventure, Revenge, Love, Rivalry, Escape, etc.), one thinks: for this I need a book?

Seven. The Internet Public Library quotes a list of seven plots (man versus nature, man versus man, etc.) that someone claims to remember from second grade. Not the most authoritative source, but no flakier than any of these other systems.

Three. From The Basic Patterns of Plot by William Foster-Harris (1959). Not one to be distracted by unnecessary detail, F-H divines three basic plots:
(1) happy ending, (2) unhappy ending, and (3) the "literary" plot, "in which the whole plot is done backwards [and] the story winds up in futility and unhappiness." Examples of literary plots are drawn from Joyce, Pirandello, and other highfalutin types for whom F-H obviously has no use.

Two. Tobias concedes that his 20 plots boil down to 2, "plots of the body"
and "plots of the mind." Plots of the body are your action flicks, full of sound and fury, not necessarily signifying anything. Plots of the mind are more cerebral and often involve "searching for some kind of meaning," which sounds dangerously like the literary plot disdained by Foster-Harris.

One. One school of thought holds that all stories can be summed up as Exposition/Rising Action/Climax/Falling Action/Denouement or to simplify it even further, Stuff Happens, although even at this level of generality we seem to have left out Proust.

See, this is the problem I have with all these schemata--first, no taxonomy can encompass everything in literature, and second, they don't tell you anything beyond the obvious. A more useful approach would be to abandon the chimera of universality and focus on what works today. By this light it seems to me that the most useful divide is: Everybody Gets Killed (or at least the hero[ine] does, e.g., Hamlet, Thelma & Louise, Romeo and Juliet, The Wild Bunch, American Beauty, etc.) versus Only the Bad Guys Get Killed (the collected works of Spielberg, Lucas, et al.). The former leaves you thinking life sucks, whereas the latter has everybody walking out of the theater with a smile. Naturally one can come up with numerous subdivisions, such as the one exemplified by Disney animated features, i.e., The Bad Guy Gets Killed but by Accident. In the odd case no one gets killed, but this is mostly in works by sensitive lady writers that seldom earn back the advance and even so usually have someone dying of cancer or in some other tragic manner (e.g., Terms of Endearment, Fried Green Tomatoes--come to think of it, someone did get killed in the latter. See what I'm saying?).

Now throw in the sizable genre of stories that may be characterized as The Protagonists Angle to Get One Another in the Sack and we begin to get a handle on the situation. My point is, never mind the 36, 20, 7, or whatever basic plots--take out sex, violence, and death and you lose 90 percent of literature right there.

The basic plots are supposed to be 1. Man against man. 2. Man against nature. 3. Man against himself. 4. Man against God.

It's pretty difficult to come up with a story that doesn't fit in one of these categories.

[James D. Macdonald]

Well, shoot. Let me try a list of basic plots:

Who are those guys?
How do we get home?
Who am I, anyway?
Gentle reader, I married him
Rape and Revenge

[Denis Castellan]

I remember having read somewhere (but I can't remember where it was, actually) that all the basic plots could be found in the Bible and that all that has been done ever since was just (basically) changing the locations and the names of the Characters.

[Tish Davidson]

Well, shoot. Let me try a list of basic plots:

Who are those guys?
How do we get home?
Who am I, anyway?
Gentle reader, I married him
Rape and Revenge

You forgot Nature hates me

[James D. Macdonald]

You forgot Nature hates me

I also forgot "One damn thing after another."

[Mistook]

I hate to keep making the music analogy, but I think it will lend some insight here.

Among musicians, the saying goes that there are only 12 notes in the scale. They saying is used not only to explain why some "original" passage of music may sound similar to songs the composer has never even heard. The 12 note statement is also used as a prefix to, "But and infinite number of songs."

There are only 26 letters in the alphabet, but it would be absurd to think that just because some other writer already used all 26, everybody who follows him cannot possibly be original.

A plot to me is like a song. To write an original piece of music, is not to invent brand new chords and phrases, but to arrange everything in a novel way. It is the act of "recombining" familiar elements into an unfamiliar, yet aesthetically satisfying whole.

And beyond new combinations, the composer can always put new twists on old themes. You get a certain chord structure going, and everybody expects you to go to the tonic at point X, but you can instead use a "deceptive cadence" at that point, suprising the listener, and taking the song to a whole different place.

A plot is just a series of related events involving a conflict and it's resolution.

-------------------

Below: My attempt to think up two totally original plots (off the top of my head). Can these be shown to be two of X stock plots? If so, how?


1) Old woman befriends the squirrels around her house. The sqirrels become bold enough to break into her house and ransack the place. Out of fear she hides in the basement and becomes trapped. Neighbors believe she is being held hostage. Stand-off between squirrels and police. Squirrels win!



2) In the future, Androids look, feel, and move just like model humans, but they have barely any personality, and can't think for themselves. That's okay because like cars, we only need them to get us from point A to point B.

Androids all come with little programs called "Skin Savers." When the droid is idle, it will perform a series of entertaining or intriguing gestures which also help prevent their skin and joints from becoming stiff.

In an attempt to imbue them with both emotion and intellect, a skin-saver programmer begins toying with hyper complex math routines that rely on outside input to make the droids movements truly unpredictable.

The flaw is that unpredictably, some droids will lock into idle mode permanantly, never to respond to human commands again. They find all the defective units and put them together, idling, in a warehouse. The insane droids end up developing a language and an agenda that only they can understand. They escape the warehouse. Two hundred years later, they comprise the "high council of Earth", whose nonsensical behavior, and insane banterings somehow rule the world in perfect harmony.

[reph]

Mistook, I'd classify #1 as man against nature. I'd classify #2 the same way if nature included machines. Where to put man-against-machine stories depends on which classification system you pick. If we consider "nature" and "God" as representing a more general category, something like "the way things go," a whole bunch of stories fit in one basket: Jurassic Park, Frankenstein, Oedipus Rex, Call of the Wild, Of Mice and Men – aw, just too many.

[Mistook]

Mistook, I'd classify #1 as man against nature. I'd classify #2 the same way if nature included machines. Where to put man-against-machine stories depends on which classification system you pick. If we consider "nature" and "God" as representing a more general category, something like "the way things go," a whole bunch of stories fit in one basket: Jurassic Park, Frankenstein, Oedipus Rex, Call of the Wild, Of Mice and Men – aw, just too many.


And thus my point is illustrated!

Plots can be boiled down to very crude terms. In the end they all fall under the heading of the Uber Plot: Conflict

You show me a story you can't boil down to "Conflict" and I'll show you a haiku. :)

The idea, as a writer, is to filter all these elements of the "Plot Theory" through your own twisted personality. That's when it becomes "original".

[katiemac]

Mistook, to continue with your music analogy:

Themes are the Bo Diddly of writing.

[Jamesaritchie]

Plot is simply something I never think about or consider. There are all means and methods of writing fiction, but for me, plot is what you automatically get as a byproduct when you tell a story.

One plot can produce a million stories.

I tend to follow the Ray Bradbury approach. "Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after the characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact, rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all plot should ever be. . ."

This may not work for everyone, but it works very well for me. I just tell a story, and the footprints left behind are the plot.

But if there's any rule I use for writing a story, it's probably the one James M listed, which I also remember seeing in one of Lawrence Block's how-to books. "Fiction is just one damned thing after another."

[Mistook]

James, do you ever find yourself at a point in the process where you have to go back and streamline the emerging plot?

[Writing Again]

Plot is simply the three act structure and how it is applied to a situation.

First act: Character gets into trouble and faces their problem head on. It begins with the character living their normal life and ends when they meet a situation that simply must be dealt with.

In a screenplay this should happen in the first ten to twenty minutes, fifteen is a good figure to aim for. In a novel it could happen on the first page or in the last chapter.

Second act: Character attempts to solve their problem but everything they do backfires and they get into deeper and deeper problems until everything looks hopeless.

In a screenplay this fills about 80 minutes of screen time. In a novel it could be one percent of the book or ninety nine percent.

Third act: Character draws upon inner resources, uses skills and or knowledge gained during the second act to solve the seemingly hopeless problem, defeat the villain, marry the girl, and live happily ever after until the sequel.

In a screenplay this fills the last twenty minutes of viewing time. In a novel, as with the other acts, there is no standard length.

All the other things listed are not actually plots, they are dramatic situations.

[Mistook]

Plot is simply the three act structure and how it is applied to a situation.

First act: Character gets into trouble and faces their problem head on. It begins with the character living their normal life and ends when they meet a situation that simply must be dealt with.

In a screenplay this should happen in the first ten to twenty minutes, fifteen is a good figure to aim for. In a novel it could happen on the first page or in the last chapter.

Second act: Character attempts to solve their problem but everything they do backfires and they get into deeper and deeper problems until everything looks hopeless.

In a screenplay this fills about 80 minutes of screen time. In a novel it could be one percent of the book or ninety nine percent.

Third act: Character draws upon inner resources, uses skills and or knowledge gained during the second act to solve the seemingly hopeless problem, defeat the villain, marry the girl, and live happily ever after until the sequel.

In a screenplay this fills the last twenty minutes of viewing time. In a novel, as with the other acts, there is no standard length.

All the other things listed are not actually plots, they are dramatic situations.


I dunno, WA...

The three act structure sounds pretty conflict driven to me. ;)

[johnnycannuk]

1) Old woman befriends the squirrels around her house. The sqirrels become bold enough to break into her house and ransack the place. Out of fear she hides in the basement and becomes trapped. Neighbors believe she is being held hostage. Stand-off between squirrels and police. Squirrels win!

I have always suspected the squirrels were up to no good. Always hording food (and probably weapons), spying on us, watching and waiting.

They're planning something, I tell ya. They are waiting for the chance to take over....


Oh, is it medication time already?

Mike

[Jamesaritchie]

James, do you ever find yourself at a point in the process where you have to go back and streamline the emerging plot?

Plot itself never seems to be a problem for me, as long as I get the first chapter right. That's the real work for me, and it can take me almost as long to get the first chapter the way I want it as it can to write the rest of the novel.

The problems I run into with the way I write deal with characterization (And sometimes character motivation.) and theme, both of which have to be straightened out in the second draft.

[maestrowork]

But don't themes and character motivations, for example, affect plot?

[MacAllister]

I like this quote:“Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.” (Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

Whenever I bog down plotting, I remind myself that I'm only doing it in the FIRST place to serve the story.

[Jamesaritchie]

But don't themes and character motivations, for example, affect plot?

I suppose they should, but for me they don't, at least not in a way that matters. Theme and motivation are there, they just need honed and brought to the surface. This is usually a matter of tightening and highlighting, rather than of serious revision. It seldom involves plot at all.

[victoriastrauss]

See, this is the problem I have with all these schemata--first, no taxonomy can encompass everything in literature, and second, they don't tell you anything beyond the obvious.I agree. I don't think this sort of rigid, overgeneralized categorization illuminates either the experience of reading or the process of writing. I honestly don't understand the fascination of boxing literature up in this way. I think it says more about the human impulse to reduce complex things to simple causes than it does about plot.

- Victoria

[Jamesaritchie]

And thus my point is illustrated!

Plots can be boiled down to very crude terms. In the end they all fall under the heading of the Uber Plot: Conflict

You show me a story you can't boil down to "Conflict" and I'll show you a haiku. :)

The idea, as a writer, is to filter all these elements of the "Plot Theory" through your own twisted personality. That's when it becomes "original".

I think conflict is the key. The trouble with most plots I see written out is that the conflict is either missing, or doesn't really relate to the story. I think the greatest, most original plot ever conceived can be turned into a truly rotten story, but if you can tell a great story, you get a good plot for free.

I feel pretty much the same way about theme. I believe every good story has a central theme, but starting with theme can turn a story into a message. If you just tell the story, the theme will be there, and you can then use the next draft to turn the dimmer switch up or down to make that theme as dim or as bright as you want it.

I suppose I'm a pretty simplistic writer. For me, writing means sticking a character in the middle of a situation where he has a serious problem to solve, or a serious question that needs answered, or both. This is the opening. The rest of the story is no more than the character's attempt to solve the problem and/or answer the question.

Frtom my perspective, it seems I am doing no more than following the POV character around and writing down what he does, says, sees, hears, smells, etc. I very, very seldom stop to wonder what happens next. Starting with page one, something happens, and this causes a reaction, which causes an action, which causes a reaction, and I just write it down as it happens.

I don't know any other way to explain it. I just write. I just tell a story. I can't do this if I'm thinking about plot or theme or am trying to follow an outline, or if I stop watching what's happening and start thinking about what will or won't happen next. For me, it's the character's story. He's doing everything, not me. So I let him tell/live the story, and I just write it down as he tells it/lives it.

Again, for me, the opening is the ending. The opening poses a problem, and/or asks a question. The story ends when the problem is solved and/or the question is answered.

I'll see the plot and theme and other details once the story is finsihed, but I'm darned if I want to think about any of them while I'm actually writing.

For me, "writing" isn't even the proper word. I'm telling a story, and it goes down on paper only so others can read it.

[Eowen]

And thus my point is illustrated!

Plots can be boiled down to very crude terms. In the end they all fall under the heading of the Uber Plot: Conflict

You show me a story you can't boil down to "Conflict" and I'll show you a haiku. :)

The idea, as a writer, is to filter all these elements of the "Plot Theory" through your own twisted personality. That's when it becomes "original".

I wish I knew what happened to my copy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Some wonderfully applicable quotes from the Lead Player. If anyone has access to a copy, please help fill in the blanks.

"Blood, Love and Rhetoric.... [cool permutations, which I can't do justice to in a summary].... Blood is compulsory." Blood, of course, being the conflict, love and rhetoric being there for everything else.

Eowen

[Mistook]

Here's a plot!


Guy wakes up on the street in a strange city. He has amnesia. He searches for the answers to who and where he is, recalling bits and peices of his life throughout the story. In the end he recalls being killed in a car accident. He realizes the city is Heaven.

[CACTUSWENDY]

:Wha: MISTOOK.....And he didn't realize that the streets of gold and the mansion was a little out of place?....hum....:poke:

[reph]

Here's a plot!

Guy wakes up on the street in a strange city....He realizes the city is Heaven.
Twilight Zone, the original one, used plots like that. In a variant, the protagonist took 26 minutes to find out he was in hell.

[Mistook]

Twilight Zone, the original one, used plots like that. In a variant, the protagonist took 26 minutes to find out he was in hell.


Reph,

Hitchcock and Serling are my two heroes when it comes to plots and themes. Twilight Zone ought to be a genre, at least according to me ;)

Now, what about that tired old cliche' of "Society V Itself V God V Nature (with a side of onion rings)"

Don't tell me. "It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World." ;)

[maestrowork]

Most stories are similiar to something else that already have been published. Find your own angles. Mix and match. Throw in some interesting (different) characters, etc. etc. to make it your own.

For example, a lot of novels by "first-time" novelists are coming-of-age stories where the protagonists travel somewhere (usually back to their home after 30 years) and discover themselves, etc. etc. The basic premise sounds the same. The variant is a) the characters; b) what happen when he gets there; c) the settings; d) the ending. Of course, the writing itself also sets the novel apart. These novels get published all the time. And people buy them.

[sGreer]

Eowen: I had the same thought after reading the first post. Here's the full quote:

We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three, concurrent or consecutive, but we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory.

And this is going on my list of .sig lines:

One school of thought holds that all stories can be summed up as Exposition/Rising Action/Climax/Falling Action/Denouement or to simplify it even further, Stuff Happens, although even at this level of generality we seem to have left out Proust.

;)

[Coco82]

I heard this in some form from a drama teacher in high school. The Bible idea is an interesting interpretation.

[Alphabeter]

Put 'em in a tree.

Throw rocks at 'em.

They climb higher.

They jump or fall outta the tree.



Now show me a plot you can't reduce to that and I'll find something besides haiku to disturb y'all with.


:Sun: