It’s been around at least from the 1950s:
You can find it at any time since, through this decade:
No two sources teach the same set of versuses, another glaring clue that the taxonomy is spurious.
I am reminded of the old mathematical saw that there’s only 52 cards in a deck, but so many different ways to arrange them that everyone in the world could shuffle cards from now until the day the Sun consumes the Earth, and you have really no chance at all the same shuffle would happen twice.
It doesn’t take too many switcheroos of this and that to create a fresh new story, and there’s more ele,ents to a movie, TV show, or novel than there are cards in a deck. Of course there will be familiarity, just as you’ll recognize the jack of clubs whenever it comes up. But I don’t ever remember seeing a movie quite like “Inside Out” before, or a TV Show like “Better Call Saul.”
The predecessor to Better Call Saul, “Breaking Bad,” has obvious elements of a Shakespearian tragedy; it is told in five acts, has a hero with a tragic flaw that eventually proved to be his downfall, collateral damage to people who don’t deserve it, and all that. Shakespeare could totally have written “The Most Lamentable Tragic Storie of Sir Walter Whyte And Jesse Pink-Man.” But it’s clearly a wildly different story than “King Lear.”
I’m curious: take a story where the protagonist is a politician trying to get elected. So, he’s trying to defeat his opponent – but, you know, this isn’t the kind of story where our hero can ‘defeat his opponent’ with a blow to the jaw; there are stories like that, and you can argue that they’re all the same; but I’m saying, what about a story where the title character only does one-on-one debates against his worthy opponent as a means to the end of getting elected by his society’s voters?
Is that a Man-Vs-Man plot, or is it Man-Vs-Society?
But my point was, those AREN’T plots – they’re fundamental themes that artists can use as a foundation for a plot. I agree with others who say to call them “plots” is to stretch the definition of the word too far.
It’s like arguing the only colors are red, blue and yellow because you can mix them to make other colors.
Or WordMan’s more elegant point about musical notes. We don’t call G# a composition, although a composer can build a composition off a single note.
[QUOTE]
And I’m seeing a bias in both yours and his in that they are male-oriented. Romance novels probably outnumber every other type of fiction published today combined. You can put romance into “a stranger came to town” but that does as much serious damage to romance as it does to that definition./Quoter]
I dunno. I haven’t read many romance novels, but the ones I have read seem to fall neatly enough into those categories. Whether it’s Boy Meets Girl or Girl Meets Boy, the protagonist faces one or more challenges in a quest for a Happy Ending.
Depends. Is the protagonist running against a corrupt system that’s backing the other candidate? Then it’s man vs. society.
Is the protagonist wrestling with his conscience whether to reveal negative information about his opponent or to continue to run a dignified, issue-oriented campaign? Then it’s man vs. himself.
Are both candidates honorable characters guided by their consciences to take opposite sides on an issue? Then it’s man. man.
Does a Chicago Fire or San Francisco Earthquake threaten not only the election, but the entire city? Then it’s man vs. nature.
In the SD column linked above, Cecil suggests three divisions:
Everybody Gets Killed (or at least the hero[ine] does)
Only the Bad Guys Get Killed
The Protagonists Angle to Get One Another in the Sack
The third one takes care of the romance.
“Boy meets girl.
Girl gets boy into pickle.
Boy gets pickle into girl.”
(Jack Woodford on plotting.)
See, what got me thinking of this was THE CANDIDATE, where Robert Redford plays a guy who of course debates his opponent – and, for the sake of argument, let’s figure they were honorable men on opposite sides.
But the thing about that movie is, they spend a ton of time showing him changing his speeches to win over audiences even when his opponent isn’t around. They show him working to pick up a key endorsement even when his opponent isn’t around. His opponent, after all, isn’t the point; they could’ve done the whole movie without that character appearing at all: just showing the title character attending fundraisers and talking with pollsters and shooting commercials to win public support.
Or – instead of one stage debate against his opponent – they could’ve shown the two men going at it in debate after debate after debate; even though, again, the real goal of the main character is still just getting millions of people to say, hey, he makes a lot of sense about big important stuff and we should totally vote for him.
And that’s weird, right? A one-on-one story of revenge or something, where the hero beats the bad guy in single combat – that seems significantly different from a story where the one-on-one stuff is just there as a means to the end of convincing society to put you in power (instead of putting the other guy in power). See how I put that last part in parentheses? That’s because it’s, uh, parenthetical.
Indeed.
As for 'Xap’s question about Romance novels, isn’t that just the world built for that particular story? If a person wants a relationship but has to learn stuff about themselves or face obstacles before they find Twue Wuv, they’ve gone on a journey, etc. It’s a different type of Quest, but a Hero / Heroine’s journey all the same.
All Western fiction is an adaption of either a Biblical tale or of Shakespeare.
All Eastern fiction is an adaption of Journey to the West or Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
There may be an infinite number of plots (or at least as many as there are settings and topics) but there are six narrative arcs which are mathematically found to universally dominate stories. This should be unsurprising because we crave a structure and resolution in the stories that we read or watch, just as we expect structure in music even when it is ‘free-form’ such as jazz or prog rock. When someone makes a film without a conclusion, such as John Sayles’ Limbo the anger of viewers left unsatisfied is palpable.
Shakespeare is mentioned above, and is notable not for his originality (much of his source material are other plays and fictions), nor that he invented any particular narrative arc structure, but how well he applied those structures and created complex characters that hew into the structure. He is the first author for which we have a comprehensive body of work which uses all of the narrative arcs, and popularized many of the tropes which dominate Western literature and plays, which has allowed them to endure changes in social mores and vernacular. Shakespeare, of course, also contributed to the modern English language more terms and quotable (and oft-misquoted) sayings than any other author in history.
As for tropes, there are a vast number of them which serve as a kind of shorthand instead of having to lay out the groundwork for the motivations of each character or rationale behind plot development. There is nothing wrong with using tropes per se and it would be nearly impossible to write something as narratively compact as a short story, play, or film without them but they are often used as a crutch for poor writing or inconsistent characterization. The best writers use tropes carefully, often presenting and then subverting it with deeper characterization or unexpected action. In many cases, however, a writer will have a small ‘trick bag’ of tropes that are used over and over again, which may be appealing or annoying depending on how much you like those tropes, e.g. Aaron Sorkin doing the exact same things (and even self-plagiarizing his own dialogue) in every show he writes.
Stranger
I say there’s seven.
C’mon, this is hardly established science.
If you had read the cited paper, you’d see that the authors did, in fact, take a scientific, data-driven approach and found that from a large sample of stories (drawn from the Gutenberg project, so while they do not represent the last seventy years or so of storytelling little seems to have changed in terms of narrative structure in that time and in fact one can observe that due to standardization in formats for television, film, and novel writing, narrative structures have become quite codified) a set of six distinct narrative arcs could be found.
Now, the narrative arc is not by itself a plot (which consists of the specifics of challenge, complication, and resolution, and may have within it any number of subplots or side plots with their own arcs), and depending on just how specific you want to be about the requisite elements to define a plot there could be endless variations, but the structure of major “beats” that a story can go through are defined by the narrative arc.
As a practical matter, most movies (and novels, and so forth) can be broken down into a few general archetypes if you are willing to be general in your description. How you divide them up may differ in number depending on how you categorize them; if you break them into genre you’ll get a different number than if you break them into narrative structure, or overarching trope, or whatever, but it is pretty clear that most films cleanly fall into a few categories, and the rare ones that don’t receive little popular acclaim or profit.
Stranger
Stranger is correct. Almost every story in existence follows a reasonably predictable structure. Hook, inciting incident, first plot point, midpoint, climax, resolution. Character arcs also have a structure. Scenes have a structure. There’s a bit of ambiguity about exactly what the structure is and where these points occur (I’ve seen it argued that the inciting incident must occur in the first chapter, and others argue it should be at about the 12% mark.) Stories are made up of beats just as music is made up of notes. There are rules, and if the rules aren’t followed, the story won’t work. There are very few exceptions, and when there are exceptions, it’s because the artist has mastered the rules and is breaking them on purpose, in specific, intentional ways. Once you begin to learn about story structure, you see it everywhere.
Structure is not the same as plot, although there are certainly conventions to be followed there. Almost every romance story has a first kiss scene. Almost every mystery has a “discovery of the crime” scene. The trick is how innovatively you can pull it off.
A very accessible book on this subject is “Structuring Your Novel” by KM Weiland. A more detailed analysis can be found in Shawn Coyne’s “Story Grid,” which is basically a giant spreadsheet that details story structure for the purposes of troubleshooting first drafts. There’s also a podcast. I’ve heard the book “Story” by screenwriter Robert McKee is exceptional.
This, by the way, is why “Ho hum, I think I’m going to finally sit down and write that novel” makes writers LOL. It’s really difficult and technical work for the vast majority of us, and can take years just to learn the basics. I’ve been tackling it seriously for four years, and still feel like a beginner.
The authors who can bang out a novel without first developing the structure are generally producing genre fiction following a well-established format even if they don’t realize it. A really difficult exercise in writing is to take a non-fictional event and try to structure it into a good story; it gives you an appreciation for how necessary it is to use structure to make a story compelling to the reader or viewer even when presenting interesting events because real world stories rarely provide consistent characters and a logical structure of compelling events without a lot of tuning.
Stranger
I’ve read a lot of romance novels, most of which I don’t like, but I write romance, so I force myself to read them. I have found writing romance novels to be uniquely challenging in that:
- You’re dealing with the character arcs of not one, but two main protagonists.
- You’re dealing with the fundamental romance plot (will they/won’t they)
- You’re dealing with some fundamental external plot
- If you’re me, you’re dealing with internal arcs, too.
So I’m writing a romance novel in a science fiction setting. That’s already complicating things because we’re dealing with a blending of two genres. But at its most fundamental, it’s a romance novel. It’s about a relationship. We’ll call the External Genre: romance. So we have two people, thrown together, falling in love, trying to make it work. Since they are meeting for the first time, the subgenre would be Courtship.
The external plot is about a war, or more specifically, an imprisoned revolutionary and the thorny issue of how to get him out of prison. The entire drive of the characters’ motivation is how to get him out of prison. If there were no romance in the novel, this novel would be in a different genre, but if there were no greater purpose beyond romance, it would be boring. So basically I have to balance the conventions of two different external genres. I think this might be referred to as romantic suspense, since it’s full of murder and torture.
Then we have to deal with the character arcs. Elen has to learn that issues aren’t as one-sided as she naively believes that they are, and Fel has to learn that he’s not a worthless piece of shit. So we’re going to call hers a disillusionment arc, and his a maturation arc. That means at key points in my novel, there have to be significant turns around these issues in order for the character development to work. That’s in addition to advancing the basic will they/won’t they plot as well as the external suspense plot. It is a lot of work, and what I’ve just described are the bare-bones basics.
Are you overwhelmed yet? Because we haven’t even touched on event/action/reaction and polarity shifts within individual scenes. Or the fact that in a really good story, the antagonist is usually reflective of the protagonist – same struggle, two different choices. Or the fundamental character conflict between the thing the protag wants and the thing the protag needs. Or any number of other craft concepts whose sole purpose, I think, is to make me feel like I will never figure this out.
Exactly what the different genres are, how character arcs are defined, what terminology we use to define them, all of that is somewhat arbitrary. In the very least, let’s say it’s hotly contested. But the discussion itself is certainly not meaningless. That is because when you sit down to write a movie or a play or a book, you have to know, either intuitively or through exhaustive research, what you are doing. You have to know what books are like your books, and what conventions you will and will not use, and how to plot out your story’s structure and your characters’ development, and it is immensely helpful to have a roadmap when you are doing this.
[QUOTE=Stranger on a Train]
The authors who can bang out a novel without first developing the structure are generally producing genre fiction following a well-established format even if they don’t realize it.
[/QUOTE]
Stephen King is a great example of this. I doubt he’s ever read a book about story structure in his life, and he acknowledges he is a total panster. But he started submitting things for publication when he was twelve, and had over twenty years’ experience reading and writing by the time Carrie launched his career. He’s just done the work so much that he intuitively understands it. I doubt he could articulate how to write a story. I doubt a lot of writers could. I don’t even think story structure was a significant subject of study until the last few decades, even though Dickens’ Christmas Carol is a gold standard positive character arc. Frankly, I’m grateful for the shortcut.
I would say most romance novels probably fit the Hero’s Journey structure. They almost always feature reluctant protagonists thrust in over their heads. They don’t want to want to object of their desire, but they do. Some event (first plot point) propels them into a scenario where they have no choice but to live in this crazy, shaken up world where they are attracted to this person they don’t want to be attracted to. Then, when they accept that they want the object of their desire, there are still all sorts of obstacles to getting it. And they almost always do get what they want, with the HAE ending (Happily Ever After), or in the very least, HFN (Happy for Now.) Classic Hero’s Journey.
*“The novel is a machine of desire.” * - Douglas Glover, Attack of the Copula Spiders
Honestly, this is storytelling at its most basic, and it’s how I keep my sanity when I’m studying craft. Storytelling is about someone really wanting something, and all the crazy shit that stands in the way of them getting what they want. When I get overwhelmed, I just ask that basic question: What does this person want right now? What is standing in their way? How can I make it even harder?
As the quote goes, “The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.”
I think King knows a bit more about storytelling structure and plotting than you are giving him credit for, but yes, he is a competent genre writer who follows generally very simple structure even when stretching away from the supernatural genre. At his best, King’s plotting is workman-like and I can’t think of anything he’s done that is narratively exceptional aside from Dolores Claiborne, but then he does not pretend to be writing for literary challenge; he is crafting stories that are compelling (largely in the unsettling, darkened room sense of the term) and characters that the reader can identify with. His draw as an author comes from the ability to tap into deep internal fear about the unknown or indifference of the world, and the narrative structure is really a framework to drape harrowing scenes and disturbing thoughts from.
I think most good writers can express at least the kind of structure and approach they apply in their own work even if they can’t do so in technical terms. Writing well is too cognitive of a process to just grind out a stream of consciousness narrative (even, or perhaps especially, if it is indented to present a character’s stream-of-consciouness), unless perhaps you are Charles Bukowski. But the formalization of structures that are nearly universal in all storytelling is relatively new (though I’d argue that the Greek tragedians starting with Aeschylus knew very well about the structures they were using and why they worked) and the application to turn writing into a more mechanical art than pure craft has ended up producing some distressingly mediocre storytelling that is technically competent and yet lacking any novel value; the modern three act biopic serving as an example; the story ‘works’ and produces the desired result, but it rarely represents the actual insights or behavior of its principal in the effort to produce something that fits into a narrative structure.
As I said, it’s a good exercise to understand the difference between having a good story or character, and putting it into a narrative structure with the beats to hold the reader’s or viewer’s attention, but it should also present a reasonably accurate version of the principal being represented rather than just a fictional character using the name of a real person, and that is very rare to find.
Stranger
I really made that assumption based on his comments in On Writing. He didn’t talk much about story structure at all, and commented that he often just starts with a character and a scenario that captures his attention and sees where it goes. At this point, I think he is such an experienced writer that he doesn’t need to consciously think about what he’s doing. But it has gotten him in trouble - he wrote that he almost never finished The Stand because he got stuck about three-quarters of the way in. He was about to pitch it in the trash when his big idea came to him - blow up a lot of the main characters.
Which may very well be why his structure often falls apart. King has so many WTF endings I sometimes wish he would take another class. All that aside, I adore King, he is among my favorite writers, and that is because he knows how to tell a good story.
I don’t disagree with this, either. There are some very technically gifted writers with no sense for storytelling and vice-versa. I wrote fiction for a long time without ever finishing anything; I would always get stuck. My current novel is the first one I ever finished (as an adult, anyway.) I was a pantser, until I discovered that pantsing creates all sorts of problems if you don’t know what you’re doing. I’m currently in the middle of a massive revision. I think I’m fairly talented from a technical perspective. If I have any strength it’s in character development and dialog, but I’m still learning how to tell a good story.
Where I got off on this kick about structure is reading Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid. He’s been an editor for 25+ years and he found it was challenging to explain to writers what they needed to fix about their stories. So he came up with this complicated spreadsheet called the Story Grid. Its purpose is to diagnose problems with stories that aren’t working. I think what stuck with me was when he explained that everyone has the experience of reading a book, that you know is really not all that well-written, but you can’t put down. Why can’t you put it down, even though technically the writing is not all that great? Because it tells a good story. When we’re talking about published genre fiction, storytelling covers a multitude of sins.
I realized I was focusing on the wrong thing in my writing. I may have a grasp on all those smaller details, but I need to look more at the big picture. What am I doing structurally and thematically, and how does this part fit into that bigger schema? Then, once I have a solid grasp on the big picture elements, I can go back to making my writing more technically beautiful.
So while I don’t think understanding story structure is sufficient to write a good book, I have personally found the concept very helpful in learning to improve my writing.
My creative writing teacher told me that there’s three basic types of stories:
- Boy Meets Girl.
- The Man Who Learns Better.
- The Little Engine That Could.
I suppose something like The Revenant would fall under #3. Something like Fight Club would be a mix of #1 & #2.
Yep. 52! = 8.06[sup]67[/sup] which is a REALLY BIG number. (For comparison’s sake, that’s about the same number of atoms in the Milky Way galaxy.)