The Seven Plot Lines That Form The Basis Of A Creative Writing Process

I began this series by saying that, according to tradition, there are only seven basic plots which form the basis of all the stories ever told or written. They are:

1. Rags to Riches
2. Overcoming the Monster
3. The Quest
4. Voyage and Return
5. Comedy
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth

We've already looked at the first three, and discovered that some story plots are a combination of two or more of the above. Today, because they're pretty self-explanatory, I'm going to touch, only briefly, on Comedy and Tragedy.

TRAGEDY

Writing a novel and getting a readership has never been an easy matter. Dickens attracted his followers by serialising his earlier works; Shakespeare by being a playwright. And he, surely, above all writers, was the master of Tragedy and Comedy? Of the tragedies, Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet are among the better known. Even now I can quote, from my schooldays, 'Friends, Romans, countrymen, I come to bury Caesar not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones'; and the treachery of those words sends a shiver down my spine.

WHY IS ROMEO & JULIET A TRAGEDY?

And who could fail to weep at the ill-fated love of history's best-loved lovers kept apart by feuding families and ultimately by misunderstanding and death? There seems to be something deep within the human psyche that is moved beyond measure by unrequited or unfulfilled love. When love is thwarted by wholly avoidable means, our sense of sorrow and outrage are augmented. So, with Romeo, who, had he realized that Juliet merely slept, would never have taken his own life, we grieve for the randomness and stupidity of happenstance.

In modern times, Erich Segal's novel and the subsequent, 1970's film, Love Story became the iconic love tragedy of our era. Starring Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw, it tells the story of a couple of university students from vastly different socio-economic backgrounds. Here again it is not only familial culture that is in force, but illness and death that eventually parts the young lovers. Father-son love eventually triumphs, and the immortal line: Love means never having to say you're sorry, is coined.

COMEDY

Shakespeare's comedies are more numerous than his tragedies and include The Taming Of The Shrew; A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor. This type of plot needs no explanation, except to say that in my view comedy - good comedy - is probably the hardest for most of us to achieve.

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NEXT TIME

We'll take a look at the final two of the Seven Story Plots: Voyage and Return, and Rebirth