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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25235
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25235
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

What strikes me about your examples is that the goals are quite abstract. This may be the peril of taking such an analytical approach to developing a story (there are, of course, perils in every approach). Stories are very concrete things. Some very particular person wants some very particular things for a very particular reason.

Taking an analytical approach to the study of fiction has led people to see all the millions of specific concrete stories are breaking down into a handful of basic patterns. (The exact number varies.) We find that thousands of stories of particular boys falling in love with particular girls in particular times and places, losing those girls in particular ways, and winning the back in particular ways, can be analysed down to a pattern: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back.

Seeing that pattern does not in any way diminish the pleasure we find in reading any of the particular stories on which the pattern is based. Nor does it imply that the author of those stories was consciously creating an instance of that pattern. They were telling, and the reader was reading, a particular story, and it is the particularity of the story that not only makes it compelling, but makes it unique.

The finding of common patterns is the point of analysis. Apply an analytical method to all of your stories and you are going to find repeating patterns because that is the nature of the method you are employing. And it fundamentally does not matter, because what matters to a reader is the particularity, the concrete grittiness, the tactile warmth, the particular quality of light and sound and smell that makes a story real.

Now, whether or not your extreme plotter approach is actually compatible with writing such as story is another matter. Regardless of whether there are repeating patterns to be found in your story, the question that should perhaps concern you is whether this method creates an actual concrete flesh and blood character or an animated archetype that performs all the technical functions of a hero but lacks that essential grittiness and particularity that is essential to the reader's enjoyment of each story in particular.

If the story strikes the reader primarily as an instance of a pattern, then the fact that each story is an instance of the same pattern will doubtless strike them as will. But if the story strikes the reader primarily as a real and concrete incident in the lives of real people, then the next story will doubtless strike them as another concrete incident in the lives of real people, not as a repetition of a familiar pattern.

Original score: 1