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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/903
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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...

Original score: 4