Post by Deleted on Nov 24, 2015 12:53:13 GMT 7
www.ipl.org/div/farq/plotFARQ.html
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.
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.
Thoughts any writers or wanna be writers out there?
www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2366/what-are-the-seven-basic-literary-plots
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.
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.
Thoughts any writers or wanna be writers out there?
www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2366/what-are-the-seven-basic-literary-plots
