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Narrative
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Morgan Wick: May I also suggest Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations
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Seth: I say link to it with a small blurb rather than a cut and paste (Think what we did with the Evil Overlord page)
Kilyle: I've been wondering how and where to put some info on Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots. His are as follows (might have the wording or order wrong, it's been a while since I read it directly): 1. Overcoming the Monster 2. Rags to Riches 3. The Quest 4. Voyage and Return 5. Comedy 6. Tragedy 7. Rebirth The basic distinctions: Overcoming the Monster is the plot of the earliest known story (Gilgamesh, I think) as well as the first James Bond film, and of course a wealth of stories in between. A hero learns of a great evil overshadowing the land (sometimes not his own land), gets special equipment and/or weapons, heads out, and defeats the evil. Booker posits a basic pattern that contains elements similar to what we think of as the point of no return and the climax of a story, and uses that pattern for each of his tales. Rags to Riches is, of course, a tale of growth to maturity, accompanied by the symbols of the impoverished initial state and the complete final state (not only money, but status and a mate, and often a kingdom). Besides such obvious ones as Cinderella (which, originally, was technically riches to rags to riches) and stories by Charles Dickens, there's Aladdin, which exemplefies Booker's idea about a false start. There's a point where it appears that the hero has everything he has ever wanted, but it's far too early, and he loses it to show he's not ready—usually through some fault of his own, though not necessarily matched to the enormity of the loss. This loss is the most devastating blow to the hero prior to the actual climax of the story. Anyway, in Aladdin it's the loss of his princess to the other man who steals his genie. The Quest is the story of seeking an object... I don't well recall how this goes... but it's the most likely to use a party instead of merely a hero. The hero might have a close friend who is loyal but little else (Samwise Gamgee), a companion who is his very opposite and displays opposite emotions (Sancho Panza), a large group of faceless minions who die right and left as the story goes on (a la The Odyssey, and often not a single one makes it safely to the end), or a balanced party distinguished by skills, generally Brains, Brawn, and some soul stat such as Charisma or Intuition or even a spiritual power (a la Blackberry, Bigwig, and Fiver from Watership Down). Voyage and Return is one of the few where connection with an other half is, according to Booker, a sign of immaturity, since this takes place in another realm from which he must return, and he is usually unable to take anyone back with him. Think Alice In Wonderland or The Labyrinth. The hero heads out into a realm in which normal laws don't work and common sense isn't going to save him. Pretty soon it turns from whimsy to threat, and after finally overcoming the threat, the hero comes back home mature but physically unchanged. Comedy is about the grand mesh of relationships between a large cast, rooted in miscommunication. The fog of misunderstanding is created by some dark figure, often the hero's parent, sometimes the hero himself, and is most focused on keeping apart the hero and his other half. Unlike the other stories, the villain is almost never just defeated; he is often redeemed, brought to a point where he admits wrongdoing and joyfully joins the party of the other characters released from the fog. The misunderstandings are cleared up and all the relationships brought into the sunlight, so at the end everyone is aligned in the best way possible. Basically, if there's three or more relationships being prevented mostly by misunderstanding or lack of acceptance, you're looking at a Comedy, even if the tone is rather dark. Shakespeare of course had several, and George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man is a good example as well. Tragedy is the flip side of Overcoming the Monster; it's the tale of the villain spiralling down into evil and then being defeated by the hero. Here, release only comes with the death or destruction of the main character. The end is seen as just, even if it is, well, tragic, and even if we can sympathize with the villain and maybe see some of his choices as right or forced. King Lear was Booker's example, I think, and one of the few where the protagonist realizes his fault at the end enough to repent, yet too late to be saved. Rebirth is the more optimistic form of Tragedy, where the villain spirals down into evil and then at the last second raises his head and gets pulled out of the mire by some redeeming figure, either his other half or a young child. The redeemer awakens the hero's ability to love (or feel compassion) and helps him also to see things as they are, including, sometimes, a reordering of priorities. Silas Marner was Booker's major example, where a little girl helps the miser to stop caring so much about his lost gold. And, of course, when you start combining elements from the seven basic plots, you end up with a more complex tale, like, for example, Lord Of The Rings, which Booker says combines, I think, six (Tragedy in the case of Saruman, and I think Comedy was the one absent). Anyway, is there a good place to put this information? Or should I, say, put it up on my home page or Live Journal and merely link to it from TV Tropes? I don't fully understand the terms of copyright, as to how well you can summarize a work before it becomes plagerizing or infringement, but Booker's book is one of the largest I have ever seen for page count (it beats out the Harry Potters, I think). Morgan Wick: I think this page has decayed from its original purpose; it looks like it was originally intended as a TV Tropes-specific effort to hash out a list of "ur-plots". Instead it's just a bland recitation of the Tobias list. It came from before we were posting the Evil Overlord List and its knockoffs, and before the How To and So You Want To sections started. As a result, I think the title could be made more specific and maybe the page itself made to look more like what The Seven Basic Plots ultimately became. |
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