The Plot’s the Thing
All the World’s a Manuscript and We Are Merely Plotters
There you go, some Shakespeare to start us off. Or some Rush, depending on whether you are forty-plus years old or four-hundred-plus years old. I appreciate both creative forces but I contend that Rush was more talented, even if you omit Alex Lifeson. If you averaged Rush—took the sum of all their talent and divided it by three—you would come up with more talent than Shakespeare had, is what I’m saying.
Shakespeare will be important in a moment, we’ll come back to him.
I trust you’ve been reading Shelf Life faithfully, so you have an excellent grasp of plot and story and the differences between the two. A plot is a sequence of dramatic events. A story is an account of something that is told to an audience to entertain them. Most people who want to sit down and write a manuscript have a story in mind that they want to tell. Coming up with the plot—the sequence of events that will carry readers from the beginning of that story through to the end—can be more challenging. (At least, it is for me.)
The good news is, you don’t have to come up with a totally original plot all on your own. Some people even say you can’t—because there is a finite number of plots, all of which have already been discovered and used over and over again. Your telling of this plot will be (hopefully) totally original, and the finished work you arrive at will be all your own, even if the plot doesn’t spring from your own mind. All the greatest writers borrow plots from one another—all the time. You can see a detailed breakdown of where Shakespeare borrowed the vast majority of his plots from in this fascinating table.
If you’ve ever had a totally vivid and engrossing story in your mind and sat down to start writing it only to peter out after ten or twenty pages because you couldn’t figure out where to go with it next, (lack of) plot was probably the thing.
Today’s article is dedicated to exploring the established plot archetypes already out there for the taking, so when you find yourself stuck or wondering how to drive your story forward, you can make like Shakespeare and just . . . commandeer.
Campbell’s Monomyth
Back when I was in school a million years ago, English faculty were all obsessed with Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces because the people who were of an age to be my teachers also mostly saw Star Wars at an impressionable age. Campbell’s book predated Star Wars by a few decades but was instrumental in George Lucas’s development of the story.
Shelf Life’s official position on Star Wars is that if one wants to dedicate their energy to the appreciation of a science fiction franchise with a couple good movies forty years ago and then a long, painful procession of terrible movies and spin-offs ever since, Alien is the superior choice.
I spent all my Star Wars nostalgia on the bad films of the early 2000s and had none left for the latest foray.
Anyway, Campbell posits that all mythological narratives share a single plot, which he calls the hero’s journey or the monomyth, a term he borrowed from Finnegans Wake.
Campbell is one of the only people to ever have read all of Finnegans Wake and lived to tell us about it. Or at least he claimed to have read all of Finnegans Wake. Since no one else has ever read it, Campbell could very well have made all that stuff up and there would be no way for us to ever know. Unless we had someone read Finnegans Wake and frankly that is not a good enough reason to put somebody through an ordeal like that.
The hero’s journey, or the monomyth, specifies seventeen specific plot points across a three-act story. Luke Skywalker’s narrative arc follows these seventeen steps, but there are tons of other media you could use as a model to understand the plot of the monomyth. Frodo Baggins followed exactly the same seventeen steps (and so did his uncle, albeit on a smaller scale). You will find this same plot in just about every heroic myth and legend. I won’t go through all seventeen points because they are well-documented and easily googled, but they’re all the things you’d expect: Receiving a call to adventure, getting supernatural aid with the quest, meeting a goddess who gifts some item or knowledge needed to complete the quest, overcoming temptation to turn away from the quest, and so on.
If what you’re writing is mythical in nature, you’ve got your work already cut out for you. Just connect the seventeen dots.
Gardner’s Two Plots
John Gardner—the same John Gardner who wrote Grendel—is often credited with dividing all the tales that have ever been told into one of the two following plots:
A person goes on a journey.
A stranger comes to town.
I say he’s “often credited” with coming up with this because what he actually said (wrote) is that most stories start with a disruption of the normal order of things, usually someone going on a journey or a stranger coming to town.
If you pick any random assortment of classics, you’ll see that this dichotomy holds up. Pride and Prejudice? A stranger comes to town. Moby Dick? A person goes on a journey. The Great Gatsby? A stranger comes to town. Heart of Darkness? A person goes on a journey. And so on.
These two events aren’t really plots. These are inciting incidents, one or the other of which is used to kick off almost every story. What Gardner meant, I think, is that all plots stem from a disruption of the normal order of life, and the normal order of life is usually disrupted in one of those two ways. A plot may go anywhere from that inciting incident, but the inciting incident is very often one of those two things.
I think there is a third, hybrid, option—in the sense that sometimes a stranger comes to town to make someone go on a journey: Effie Trinket and Katniss Everdeen; Hagrid and Harry Potter; Gandalf and anybody named Baggins.
Thought exercise: Speaking of Grendel, which one of these two plots does Beowulf use? Is it about a guy who goes on a journey? Or a stranger who comes to town? I’ve been thinking about it for days and legitimately cannot decide. From the narrator’s point of view, a stranger (Beowulf) comes to town; but the poem is about Beowulf, a guy who goes on a journey.
Foster-Harris’s Three Plots
William Foster-Harris, in his book The Basic Patterns of Plot, contends that there are actually three plots and that all stories can be divided into one of these three:
Happy Ending
Unhappy Ending
Tragedy
Let me get in here real quick before you (correctly) point out that an unhappy ending and a tragedy are the same thing. The above list is highly simplified.
The happy ending is one in which the protagonist makes a sacrifice for someone else, going against what seems to be in their own best interest logically. An unhappy ending is one in which the protagonist goes with what seems logically correct for themself and does not make the necessary sacrifice for someone else. A tragedy is a story in which the defining event takes place at the beginning, and all that follows is the inevitable, fated fallout of that event.
Consider:
The Last Unicorn, a happy ending—when Lir sacrifices his life to save the Unicorn, she finds the courage to fight off the Red Bull and save Lir’s life.
1984, an unhappy ending—Winston is unable to sacrifice himself to protect Julia and sells her out to the Party instead.
Antigone, a tragedy—the defining incident at the beginning is Antigone’s burial of her brother Polynices, and everything that comes after is the fallout of her unlawful act.
Foster-Harris believed all plots fall into one of those three archetypes but, again, the main thing that Foster-Harris typifies is how the story ends. Does it end with a happy ending brought on by a sacrifice, an unhappy ending brought on by a failure to sacrifice, or is the ending a foregone conclusion due to the critical decision having been made at the very outset of the story?
Booker’s Seven Plots
Finally, in this actual century and not seventy-plus years ago, Christopher Booker wrote a treatise on The Seven Basic Plots. According to Booker, there are seven plot archetypes total that all stories can be sorted into:
Overcoming the monster—protagonist must defeat antagonist (eg, Harry Potter)
Rags to riches—protagonist starts with nothing, gains everything, loses it, and gains it again (eg, Jane Eyre)
Quest—protagonist sets out to acquire an object or achieve a goal (eg, The Lord of the Rings)
Voyage and return—protagonist goes on a journey, returns a wiser person (eg, Heart of Darkness)
Comedy—a humorous protagonist finds themself in ever-more-confusing circumstances until everything is resolved cheerfully by a single clarifying event (eg, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
Tragedy—protagonist’s character flaw or tragic mistake brings about their ultimate undoing (eg, Antigone)
Rebirth—protagonist is forced to change or mend their character flaws and grow as a person to alleviate the conflict (eg, Pride and Prejudice)
Booker’s book was the work of many years’ study and has its roots in Jungian analysis, something I know less than nothing about.
He describes a metaplot, which all of the above plots follow, in which the anticipation stage gives way to the dream stage, then the frustration stage, then the nightmare stage, and finally the resolution. I don’t find this especially unique to Booker, as it maps almost exactly to Freytag’s five-stage story structure (which I think most of us learned in school), the one that goes exposition to rising action to falling action to climax to resolution. Same thing, different names.
You’ll note that all of the plot archetypes Booker lists necessarily have a positive outcome or a happy ending, with the exception of the tragedy. The comedy requires a cheerful resolution; the rags-to-riches story requires that the protagonist ends with more than they began with; the voyage-and-return archetype necessitates there be a return.
Whatever story you have to tell, you can probably see it reflected in one of Booker’s models, if not more than one. I can think of several classic stories that have characteristics of two or more archetypes, to the extent I’d have a hard time figuring out for sure which category is correct. I think it’s likely you’ll find your story fitting parts of multiple archetypes rather than none at all—but if you’ve got something so unique that Booker didn’t cover it, I’d love to hear it.
Put Past Plots to Work
At the start of this article, I promised some tried-and-true plots to borrow from when you get stuck, so you might be wondering—where’s the list? The list includes every story ever told so I don’t have enough space to detail all of them. What you can do is look through the archetypes above and figure out where your own story fits in based on the elements you already have figured out and fill in the rest from the above.
What I mean is, the archetypes above—when put together—will deliver a plot for any story you can possibly imagine. A plot, at its most basic, is a series of events that form a beginning, a middle, and an end. If Gardner is correct, there are only two ways to begin; if Foster-Harris is correct, there are only three ways to end; and if Booker is to be believed, there are really only seven archetypes for the middle (some of which will indicate which of Foster-Harris’s endings you’ll need to employ).
Don’t know how to start your story? Your protagonist is going on a journey, or a stranger is coming to their town. Pro tip: Editors and writing experts are always telling authors to begin their story at the latest possible moment—if you’re not sure where that is, think about your story and look for one of these two situations. That’s where to start.
Don’t know how to end your story in a satisfying way? Either your protagonist is going to make a sacrifice for happiness; or they’re going to fail to make a sacrifice to secure their own happiness; or their critical decision came early in the story and their unhappy outcome is fated. If you’re having trouble figuring out how to get your protagonist to the ending you had in mind for them (happy or unhappy), check to see if you’ve deviated from this formula somewhere, and how.
Lost somewhere in the middle? Look to Booker—you can search any of the seven story archetypes to find dozens of examples across all different media. Review a few examples for inspiration to see how other authors writing these archetypes have moved their plots forward. Look for commonalities in the plots and find ways to incorporate them—or subvert them—in your own work.
Remember, ideas aren’t proprietary and they aren’t valuable. Don’t plagiarize, obviously, but borrow liberally. Take plot points, structures, twists and turns, from other plots you’ve seen, pull them into your story, and make them your own. Every good writer does.
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