The Seven Basic Plots
The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker was recommended to me by one of the tutors on the writing course I attended just before Christmas. I've now finished it, and felt it was worth a lengthy review.
It's an immense work. With over 700 pages of teeny tiny type, we would expect it to be virtually unreadable, but it’s not. It’s interesting, revealing, and thought provoking. A work that has taken over forty years to write and involved the reading of a huge amount of literature, Booker does his subject justice.
Many of us, especially those of us who are writers, find the idea that there are very few plots intriguing. Without thinking about it too hard, we can all trace similarities between stories we have read, heard or seen as movies, for example most of us are aware of a quest type plot, where the hero or group of heroes must go through many adventures in order to achieve their goal. LOTR is only one of the more recent examples.
In the first section of the book, Booker describes the seven plots he has identified, while noting that many stories take elements from more than one. He concentrates largely on Western examples, using stories that are likely to be familiar to the book’s intended audience. Later on, in other sections he does note examples from other cultures, to highlight the universality of the strands that he has identified.
The plots are, Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and lastly, Rebirth. Of these, he identifies comedy as the only one that has evolved during the historical period, from the Greek comedies of Aristophanes et al. It is worth noting that of these, only tragedy does not have a happy ending.
As an example, this is the outline of the Rebirth plot.
1. A young hero or heroine falls under the shadow of the dark power (whatever that is).
2. For a while, all may seem to go reasonably well, the threat may even seem to have receded;
3.eventually, it approaches again in full force, until the hero or heroine is seen imprisoned in the state of living death; (this may be internal or external)
4. this continues for a long time, when it seems that the dark power has completely triumphed;
5. but finally comes the miraculous redemption: either, where the imprisoned figure is a heroine, by the hero; or, where it is the hero, by a Young Woman or a Child.
This is the plot of my last novel, and probably the current one as well.
But we can all think of stories that do not fit into these patterns - stories like Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, or any Sherlock Holmes story. The second section of the book is devoted to what Booker calls stories that ‘miss the mark’. He asserts that this type of story has developed in Western literature over the last 200 years, as a result of the rise of Romanticism. I found this section very revealing, as it explained the dissatisfaction I have often felt with certain authors.
The final section is devoted to an examination of why we tell stories, and produces an explanation that is rooted in psychology. I found it interesting, but felt that Booker's conclusions were a bit suspect. I liked his examination of the Trickster archetype though..
On the downside, the book is often repetitive, with the same examples being gone over several times. It is also very badly edited with numerous typos, and Booker’s editor really should have tried to stop him using the word ‘little’ quite so frequently.
This will certainly be a book to dip into many times, and I recommend it to everyone with a desire to explore further the structure of stories and the archetypes behind them.
I think that over the coming months, it might be fun to analyse some of the stories I read, in terms of which plot I think they use, and post about it.
It's an immense work. With over 700 pages of teeny tiny type, we would expect it to be virtually unreadable, but it’s not. It’s interesting, revealing, and thought provoking. A work that has taken over forty years to write and involved the reading of a huge amount of literature, Booker does his subject justice.
Many of us, especially those of us who are writers, find the idea that there are very few plots intriguing. Without thinking about it too hard, we can all trace similarities between stories we have read, heard or seen as movies, for example most of us are aware of a quest type plot, where the hero or group of heroes must go through many adventures in order to achieve their goal. LOTR is only one of the more recent examples.
In the first section of the book, Booker describes the seven plots he has identified, while noting that many stories take elements from more than one. He concentrates largely on Western examples, using stories that are likely to be familiar to the book’s intended audience. Later on, in other sections he does note examples from other cultures, to highlight the universality of the strands that he has identified.
The plots are, Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and lastly, Rebirth. Of these, he identifies comedy as the only one that has evolved during the historical period, from the Greek comedies of Aristophanes et al. It is worth noting that of these, only tragedy does not have a happy ending.
As an example, this is the outline of the Rebirth plot.
1. A young hero or heroine falls under the shadow of the dark power (whatever that is).
2. For a while, all may seem to go reasonably well, the threat may even seem to have receded;
3.eventually, it approaches again in full force, until the hero or heroine is seen imprisoned in the state of living death; (this may be internal or external)
4. this continues for a long time, when it seems that the dark power has completely triumphed;
5. but finally comes the miraculous redemption: either, where the imprisoned figure is a heroine, by the hero; or, where it is the hero, by a Young Woman or a Child.
This is the plot of my last novel, and probably the current one as well.
But we can all think of stories that do not fit into these patterns - stories like Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, or any Sherlock Holmes story. The second section of the book is devoted to what Booker calls stories that ‘miss the mark’. He asserts that this type of story has developed in Western literature over the last 200 years, as a result of the rise of Romanticism. I found this section very revealing, as it explained the dissatisfaction I have often felt with certain authors.
The final section is devoted to an examination of why we tell stories, and produces an explanation that is rooted in psychology. I found it interesting, but felt that Booker's conclusions were a bit suspect. I liked his examination of the Trickster archetype though..
On the downside, the book is often repetitive, with the same examples being gone over several times. It is also very badly edited with numerous typos, and Booker’s editor really should have tried to stop him using the word ‘little’ quite so frequently.
This will certainly be a book to dip into many times, and I recommend it to everyone with a desire to explore further the structure of stories and the archetypes behind them.
I think that over the coming months, it might be fun to analyse some of the stories I read, in terms of which plot I think they use, and post about it.