What are some examples of modern original plots?

Writer's Digest lists all 20 plots. That's all there are. If you find a story, it will use one (or several of them) but for many centuries, this list hasn't changed.

For example, the nanobot story mentioned by Claudiu has the same basic plot as Golem (16th century) or Frankenstein's monster (1818) or Icarus (ancient greeks). There are minor differences (Golem doesn't fall into love, for example) but at the core. From the list, that's plot #10 TEMPTATION and #18 WRETCHED EXCESS and a bit of #20 DECENSION.

Here is the list (in case the link breaks again):

1. Quest - Character has a specific goal
2. Adventure - Focus on the journey instead of the goal
3. Pursuit - Focus on the chase
4. Rescue - Focus on the action
5. Escape - Focus on getting out of something instead of getting somewhere specific
6. Revenge
7. Riddle - There is a conflict between what happens and what seems to have happened.
8. Rivalry - The irresistable force meets the immovable object, i.e. both sides should have the same power.
9. Underdog - Like rivalry but with a mismatch in power.
10. Temptation - Examines motives, needs and impulses of the character
11. Metamorphosis - One important aspect changes. Think of the old tales about people getting cursed and saved by love.
12. Transformation - The main character changes, evolves, matures in many ways.
13. Maturation - Confused, unclear character becomes sound, resolute, reliable. Basis for many stories which show how a child becomes an adult.
14. Love - You want it but you can't have it.
15. Forbidden Love - Like love but others don't want you to have it.
16. Sacrifice - Character achieves goal at great personal cost.
17. Discovery - Plot about making a great discovery. Similar to adventure (the journey is the goal).
18. Wretched Excess - Watch a character undo itself.
19. Ascension - Character solves a moral dilemma in a positive way.
20. Descension - Character tries to solve a moral dilemma and fails.

Related:

• The Seven Basic Plots
• Types of Plots
• The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations

posted almost 14 years ago

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Aaron Digulla‭

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No country for old men (book, haven't seen the movie) had a killer and a guy who found some money. Don't want to spoil it, but I don't think it can be fit into any of the tradional plots - no resolution of a problem, for example.

Kind of left you unsatisfied, at the "end", which is perhaps why the traditional plots are so ubiquitous - they "work".

posted almost 14 years ago

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MGOwen‭

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There are no completely original plots. There are authors who have managed to put an original spin on an old idea, however. But when you boil the basic plot down, it's going to be the same as thousands, if not millions, of other stories out there. The trick to writing a good book is to take an existing plot and add your own personal spin to it to create an original work.

posted almost 14 years ago

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Ralph Gallagher‭

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I think it probably depends on how much you simplify the plots. You can boil any plot down to:

• Scene is set.
• Problem arises.
• Problem is resolved.

For example, the book Prey by Michael Crichton is about some nanobots that are unleashed, begin evolving, and start threatening humanity, etc. I bet no one has written about nanobots in particular, with having the story develop the way it does, but the idea is the same: motives cause people to do stupid things, a creation turns on its masters, etc.

I wrote some random short stories which might be considered original plots. But maybe more so because of a lack of a plot... but it is surreal, and surrealism has been done before. Here is one as an example:

Surrounded by water. Completely submerged. Swimming upwards, but the world is slowly darkening. Which way is up? That way which was left was up, but now going upwards the compass has reversed, the poles of the earth have reversed. A homing pigeon flies through the water next to me and drowns. I stare at its lifeless body as it transforms into a flounder and swallows me whole. A voiceless scream emanates from my body but the fish doesn’t hear me.

Riding in a bus, I realize I have just woken up. We’ve almost arrived at the Tsarskoe Selo. But in the stupor after brutally being awaken, I don’t know this yet. I inquire of my neighbor, “Hey dude, where are we?” He replies in a soft whisper, the sound waves wrapping themselves around my head: “We’ve almost arrived at the Tsarskoe Selo.” “Thanks,” I reply half-heartedly, already bored with the conversation.

The bus, speeding at several hundred versts per hour, smashes through the side of the Catherine Palace and we tumble out into the entrance hall to meet our tour guide. Her head is a perfect sphere with a diameter of three feet – “Thank God she’ll be easy to see,” I think to myself, my only anxiety about the trip alleviated.

As we look on, she begins describing various aspects of the palace. None of us ever move; her head is a dense black hole which distorts reality. Rooms fly by – bedrooms, dining rooms, studies, and finally, the Amber Room. A spectacle all of its own, a wonder of the modern world, thirty seven slightly distinguished shades of amber combine in an astoundingly scintillating conglomeration of yellows and browns. Numbers jet out from the guide’s head, slamming into us, directly driving the realization into our heads of the vast wealth expropriated for its construction.

We travel back through time briefly to watch how the German Fascists stripped every chamber in the abode of the tsars… a misfire, and we’re returned to the present directly above the serene blue lake in the center. As we plunge into the water, with growing horror I realize that my earlier hallucinations on the bus were in fact a prophecy. A pigeon flies past me through the water…

Is that an original plot? I bet those particular events have never been written about in that way...

posted almost 14 years ago

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Claudiu‭

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There are an infinite number of plots. The claim is that there is a limited number of types of plots. This list that Aaron Digulla quotes is a list of types of plots.

Being an orderly species and liking simple answers as we do, we like to take anything complex and divide it into parts to help us understand it better. This means finding something that a subset of the objects we are looking at have in common, calling it a type, and continuing until there are no more instances left.

A truly rigorous type system would have no overlaps (nothing could be of more than one type) and nothing, by the very nature of the type system itself, could ever not be of any of the types. Coming up with a type system that rigorous is very difficult and arguably impossible in most cases. Most actual type systems fake the property of being all inclusive by including a category that is a tacit "everything else". I'd say that ascension and descension fulfil that role in this typology.

Once you put an "everything else" category in your type system, you make it impossible for there to be anything that does not fit the type system. But this is fundamentally a cheat.

But the thing is, no such type system is an objective truth. It is an intellectual convenience. It may be useful, but it is not definitive. Someone else can some along and make a type system with more of fewer types or types based on different properties, and as long as they include an implicit "everything else" category, their system too will be logically complete.

So can there be a plot that does not fit in this type system for plots? No? Does that tell us anything? No, because the catch-all categories assure that everything will always fit.

posted about 8 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

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