Archetypal Stories - only seven basic plots

It has been suggested that their are only 7 basic plots and that all plots are a variation on the seven.

The following has a short discussion on the idea: Archetypal Stories: "seven"

Christopher Booker discusses the issue in his "Seven Basic
Plots -- why we tell stories"
Another summary can be found here:



To me the search for archetypal stories is similar to stating that all songs are made up from 8 notes plus sharps and flats. i.e. it is not very important because a finite set of components can be used with infinite variation.

Comments

Eric Hovis said…
Maybe the difference is that you can get inspiration from a single plot concept, whereas I usually don't get inspiration from a single musical note. We can use the basic plots as a jumping off point because a plot is more like a chord progression than a single note, and you can make a whole song much more easily if you have a chord progression in mind beforehand.

Outlines are always helpful to creators, whether it's a pre-defined song structure that you can tweak or a predefined complete plot that you can tweak. Therefore there is a world of merit in this kind of analysis.
3:49 pm
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