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I've heard people talk about there being two basic plots: - stranger comes to town - stranger leaves town You could similarly say that there are two b

I've heard people talk about there being two basic plots: - stranger comes to town - stranger leaves town You could similarly say that there are two basic plots: - love - hate Or even: - love/hate - indifference This is all very silly. Why not say that there is only one basic plot: - something happens (or not) There are no classifications that are both neutral and useful. A useful classification corroborates a thesis, and, in this case, asserts an ordering or structuring of some set of objects. We could pick any arbitrary, discrete attribute and classify plots by each gradation of this attribute, like the above. Putting items in this classification is fun, but it doesn't generate knowledge if the classification does not convey some additional meaning. A phylogenetic tree or a periodic table impute some ordering on the natural world that allows us to make meaningful predictions about undiscovered animals and chemical elements. They also support scientific theses about evolutionary biology and modern chemistry. They are not neutral (purely descriptive) classifications. What additional knowledge do any of these story plot classifications give us?

jamesdutc 11y ago
This critique is a bit broader than the specific complaint about structuralism (which leads us to garbage like Joseph Campbell's Monomyth/Hero's Journey): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism#Structuralism_in_literary_theory_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism#Structuralism_in...
hugh4 11y ago
>What additional knowledge do any of these story plot classifications give us? Well, at the very least, it's a nice store of writing prompts. What I would say is that it's less of a classification and more of a map. Out of the vast space of possible stories, here are the sections of story space which tend to get told again and again. Why? Because these are the sorts of stories are of interest to our silly human brains. Here's a story. One day a man bought a newspaper. Then he saw a giraffe, and he threw the newspaper into a river. The Queen of Denmark bought a trombone. Was that a good story? No, it was dull, incoherent and meaningless, just a sequence of actions. We can't identify with them at all. Here is another story. One day a man met a woman. But the Queen of Denmark kidnapped the woman. So the man went and rescued her. Now that's a much better story! It needs a bit of fleshing out, but it's precisely the sort of sequence of actions that humans like being told about, over and over again. It's somewhat bizarre that humans should enjoy hearing lies about stuff that never actually happened, but we do -- only very specific types of lies about very specific types of stuff. This list is a vague attempt to map out the specific types of stuff that people like hearing about, and from that we can get insight into our own psychology.
- jamesdutc 11y ago
  I agree. A list of common story structures can be effectively used as a heuristic in synthesizing new stories from these structures, and this list does an extremely terse list of common themes. It's definitely fatiguing to generate these repetitive stories, and I would argue that there are literary traditions (still alive today on television, in film, in music!) where your surreal, absurd, existentially nihilistic story about giraffes, the Queen of Denmark, and the law-man beating up the wrong guy would fit in nicely!
pessimizer 11y ago
You're thinking of this plotlist as some sort of taxonomic abstraction. For the writers of light entertainment like movies and serials, this is a pragmatic resource that can be used to generate deliverable work product. There's absolutely no need for this list to be systematic, exhaustive, or made up of orthogonal vectors.
megablast 11y ago
You seem to think it is a competition to reduce the number of plots down to a low number as possible. More it is an interesting experiment into analysis between films.
- jamesdutc 11y ago
  I'm calling these classifications "reductive." Unfortunately, this kind of structuralist analysis can be useful but it's limited. In contemporary critical analysis, it has been supplanted by (or augmented with) more useful techniques. These techniques are more capable of drawing meaningful distinctions between structurally similar works. For example, this simplistic thematic classification will miss a lot of the meaning in surrealist or absurdist works like those of Jodorowsky (or even a contemporary BBC3 comedy like _Snuff Box_!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff_Box_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff_Box_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky

jamesdutc 11y ago

This critique is a bit broader than the specific complaint about structuralism (which leads us to garbage like Joseph Campbell's Monomyth/Hero's Journey): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism#Structuralism_in_literary_theory_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism#Structuralism_in...

hugh4 11y ago

>What additional knowledge do any of these story plot classifications give us? Well, at the very least, it's a nice store of writing prompts. What I would say is that it's less of a classification and more of a map. Out of the vast space of possible stories, here are the sections of story space which tend to get told again and again. Why? Because these are the sorts of stories are of interest to our silly human brains. Here's a story. One day a man bought a newspaper. Then he saw a giraffe, and he threw the newspaper into a river. The Queen of Denmark bought a trombone. Was that a good story? No, it was dull, incoherent and meaningless, just a sequence of actions. We can't identify with them at all. Here is another story. One day a man met a woman. But the Queen of Denmark kidnapped the woman. So the man went and rescued her. Now that's a much better story! It needs a bit of fleshing out, but it's precisely the sort of sequence of actions that humans like being told about, over and over again. It's somewhat bizarre that humans should enjoy hearing lies about stuff that never actually happened, but we do -- only very specific types of lies about very specific types of stuff. This list is a vague attempt to map out the specific types of stuff that people like hearing about, and from that we can get insight into our own psychology.

jamesdutc 11y ago
I agree. A list of common story structures can be effectively used as a heuristic in synthesizing new stories from these structures, and this list does an extremely terse list of common themes. It's definitely fatiguing to generate these repetitive stories, and I would argue that there are literary traditions (still alive today on television, in film, in music!) where your surreal, absurd, existentially nihilistic story about giraffes, the Queen of Denmark, and the law-man beating up the wrong guy would fit in nicely!

pessimizer 11y ago

You're thinking of this plotlist as some sort of taxonomic abstraction. For the writers of light entertainment like movies and serials, this is a pragmatic resource that can be used to generate deliverable work product. There's absolutely no need for this list to be systematic, exhaustive, or made up of orthogonal vectors.

megablast 11y ago

You seem to think it is a competition to reduce the number of plots down to a low number as possible. More it is an interesting experiment into analysis between films.

jamesdutc 11y ago
I'm calling these classifications "reductive." Unfortunately, this kind of structuralist analysis can be useful but it's limited. In contemporary critical analysis, it has been supplanted by (or augmented with) more useful techniques. These techniques are more capable of drawing meaningful distinctions between structurally similar works. For example, this simplistic thematic classification will miss a lot of the meaning in surrealist or absurdist works like those of Jodorowsky (or even a contemporary BBC3 comedy like _Snuff Box_!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff_Box_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff_Box_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky