Sorry if this comes off all vague-like, but it’s always being said that there are only so-many stories that just keep getting recycled by Hollywood, authors, playwrights, etc. I think Oedipus and Romeo and Juliet are two of them. What are the others? And who said this? Is there on definitive list of boy-meets-girl type scenarios or endless variations?
(so many errors in such a short post…)
There are as many philosophies of storytelling as there are storytelling philosophers. If you read Robert McKee, one of the top screenwriting gurus in Hollywood (whose formula-based seminar is parodied by name in Adaptation), you get one count of story types; I think it’s sixteen or seventeen. If you read Aristotle, you get another count.
Short answer, there is no definitive list on which everybody agrees. Some lists are three items long (man vs. nature, man vs. man, man vs. himself), some have thirty items. There really isn’t a lot of consistency.
And in my opinion, the multitude of lists says less about the nature of storytelling and more about the inability of human beings to resist the urge to arbitrarily divide, label, and categorize even completely subjective experiences that do not lend themselves to such rigid empirical treatment.
I learned those as the 3 possible types of “conflict” within the narrative, rather than 3 “plots”. But yes, Cervaise (and Cecil, but that is a given) has it: first you’d have to be able to agree on a consensus set of things that make up a distinct taxonomy of “plot” – as opposed to multi-directional combinations of genre, idiom, form, setting or subject. The really short lists are often more like philosophical exercises themselves (such as Borges’ 4 stories of the Battle, the Journey, the Quest and the Sacrifice).
All the “basic narratives” list basically rely on greater or lesser numbers of specifics in order to arrive at the conclusion. If you want to claim that there’s only, say, three types of stories, you’d then go on to outline three very vague, very general story types, probably a single sentence (you can go even more vague and simply say “Stuff happens”).
So what level of specificity do you want to arrive at? Are you willing to settle for something as vague as “Tragic love”, or do you want to go for something more like “Unfortunate circumstances and tragic coincidence result in two young lovers coming close to happiness, but have it wrenched away by fate”, a story differentiated by “A heartless family forces a girl to marry someone she doesn’t love, and instead finds happiness in the arms of a young talentless dickhead, and they die”…
Note that I just described Romeo and Juliet and Titanic, respectively… though both stories can fall under the basic premise of “Tragic love”… even though they are each very different stories.
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Our Hero Goes on a Journey.
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A Stranger Came to Town.
It’s sometimes been useful for me to use a model I derived from Flannery O’Conner, though she never stated it as a theory of literature.
There are two basic story types: the tragedy and the comedy.
In every story, there is a character who is given an opportunity to do the right thing. If he accepts the opportunity, the story has a happy ending (a “comedy,” in the original sense). If he rejects the opportunity and does the wrong thing, tragedy ensues.
Almost all stories I’ve ever encountered can be broken down along those lines. Now, this can fuck with some stories. Snow White, for instance: who’s given an opportunity to do the right thing? Not Snow White; she just drifts along as things happen TO her. She’s a device, not a character. In that story, the only character with a choice to make is the Queen. She can accept that she’s growing old, and that her husband loves her AND his daughter, or she can rail against this reality and do the wrong thing. Snow White is the Queen’s tragedy, not Snow White’s happy ending. IMHO.
Anyway, though this is not a universal, it has sometime helped me get to the heart of a story.
Ah, but then where would we put The Sun Also Rises?
And lissener, it seems to me that in a good story, the main character might have many choices to make, and sometimes make the right choice, sometimes the wrong one. How then?
Like I said, Chronos, it’s not universal. But there’s usually a turning point, a key moment when a key decision is made.