Da-da-da-dah! (Beethoven’s Fifth, remember?
Yesterday, I talked a little bit about my search for the 8 Plots, those mysterious archetypes, paradigms that I had been hearing teachers and fellow writers reference over the years without ever actually listing them. I went searching and re-discovered something I have long known. Humanity has a passion for lists! Maybe we’re overwhelmed by the vast array of knowledge and feel like if we can just reduce portions of it to a definitive list, we would be able to master it. (Ain’t gonna happen, but that’s another story.)
In the course of this, I found list after list of plots — The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, and 20 Master Plots (and How to Build Them), for example.* Lots of lists and lots of numbers. But, for some reason, I couldn’t come up with the more ubiquitously cited eight.
Having a pencil and paper at hand, I sat down to noodle and doodle, and I scribbled away furiously, until it suddenly came to me. All these variations I was devising could be boiled down into one.
Every plot, at its essence, is the Quest for Salvation. (Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, this turns out to be very similar to Joseph Campbell’s research. Check out “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” or “The Power of Myth.”)
Test it. Think of a book, a movie, a play. Once you strip away the details (the mere bagatelles of setting, location, psychology, time period and so forth) and you figure out exactly how “salvation” is defined in this particular world, I think you’ll find that it works.
In all romantic comedies, Salvation = Happily Ever After.
In murder mysteries, Salvation = Solve the Crime, Catch the Murderer
In many sci-fi stories (“Independence Day,” The Terminator series), Salvation = (literally) Saving the World
The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is whether or not salvation is attained in the end.
I think that our entire body of literature can be distilled down to this one plot.
So, the good news is, you can’t come up with an original plot. All you can do is come up with an original voice in which to write about some variation of recognizable circumstances.
And we can all do that.
