The Seven Basic Plots.

In today’s lecture Olwen explained Booker’s Seven Basic Plots.
Apparently there are only seven stories in existence and every single fairytale, book, film that you’ve ever read, encountered or watched will follow or fall under one of these seven basic plots.

• 1. Overcoming the Monster — A hero learns of a great evil overshadowing the land (sometimes not his own land). He gets special equipment and/or weapons, heads out, and defeats the evil, freeing the land. To symbolically complete the tale, the Hero receives three things: a treasure, a kingdom or something to rule over, a Princess (ultimate mate, the hero’s other half) and the They All Lived Happily Ever After ending. Stories like Beowulf, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, Jaws, and many of the James Bond films.

• 2. Rags to Riches — These stories feature modest, generally virtuous but downtrodden characters, who achieve a happy ending when their special talents or true beauty is revealed to the world at large. Includes any number of classics such as ‘Cinderella’, ‘Aladdin’ and the Horatio Alger novels.

• 3. The Quest — A hero, often accompanied by sidekicks, travels in search of a priceless treasure and fights against evil and overpowering odds, and ends when he gets both the treasure and the girl. The Odyssey and Lord of The Rings are classic examples of this kind of story.

• 4. Voyage and Return — Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, other stories of normal protagonists who are suddenly thrust into strange and alien worlds and must make their way back to normal life once more.

• 5. Comedy — Not always synonymous with humour. Instead, the plot of a comedy involves some kind of confusion that must be resolved before the hero and heroine can be united in love. Think of Shakespeare’s comedies, The Marriage of Figaro, the plays of Oscar Wilde and Gilbert and Sullivan, and even War and Peace.

• 6. Tragedy — As a rule, the terrible consequences of human overreaching and egotism. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Julius Caesar, Anna Karenina…this category is usually self-evident.

• 7. Rebirth — The stories of Ebeneezer Scrooge and Mary Lennox would fall into this basic plot type, which focuses on a threatening shadow that seems nearly victorious until a sequence of fortuitous (or even miraculous) events lead to redemption and rebirth, and the restoration of a happier world.

We were asked the name our favourite movie and to categorise it in one of the seven basic plots. My favourite movie is Back To The Future. It was quite easy for me to categorise it to be honest. It’s a prime example of Voyage and Return where the main character travels off into a ‘dreamland’ on some sort of quest, then eventually they return to reality but gains something from their experience away yet everything else around them remains the same.

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