>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

>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.