Friday, March 09, 2007

7 Basic Story Plots

Today I read up this very interesting piece of news in Ask Yahoo! that there are only seven basic story plots in the world ! They are :
  • (wo) man vs. nature
  • (wo) man vs. man
  • (wo) man vs. the environment
  • (wo) man vs. machines/technology
  • (wo) man vs. the supernatural
  • (wo) man vs. self
  • (wo) man vs. god/religion
Hmmm . . . . . now who knew that? At the first sight I passed the lot as a joke. But later in the day I gave a serious thought to it and tried to find a story that I had read which did not qualify for any of the above categories. Interestingly, I could not find any. If any of you could find another category please do inform me. Frankly I was astonished that I could not find even one out-of-category story !!

3 comments:

  1. interesting indeed, but the basic problem is that man is the protagonist in all the plots, how about a plot of technology vs technology, or technology vs supernatural!

    you have just given me countless possibilities to write new stories!! :D

    /V

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  2. Machine vs Machine or Technology vs Technology sound good, but then it falls in the (wo)man vs machines category .... as the technology is created by humans only.

    I might sound closed, but it is still beyond me to think of technology without an inventor.

    But I'd sure like to read some stories of the new genre. Any writers?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Some of Issac Asimov's philosophical - SF&F short stories fall in the category "just Technology". The most prominent (and one of my all time faves) is
    The Last question.

    http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

    ReplyDelete

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