I just finished a ponderously long tome (700 pages) by Christopher Booker entitled The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. It is, of course, impossible to summarize a book of this length and significance in a single blog post. But, what I will do here is to provide a gross over simplification of why it is important and then provide more insight into it in future posts from time to time.
Most of you probably know that chemistry was preceded by a more primitive field of study called alchemy. For those of you who like word origins, the Ancient Greeks had a field of study called chemia which we would call metallurgy. When this knowledge passed into the Arab world it was referred to as "the chemia" or alchemy. This, in turn, came back into the Latin West along with most Greek knowledge including the works of Plato and Aristotle around the 12th century CE. Alchemy was a combination of mysticism and practice. And it did not make much progress until the 17th century when practitioners began to approach it scientifically. Along the way, fundamental units which we call elements were identified and these elements were organized into the Periodic Table. At this point, advances in chemistry took off like a rocket.
"What does this have to do with stories?", you might ask. Writing today is a combination of mysticism and practice. You can refer back to the blog post on September 20, 2020 entitled Two Schools of Thought on Writing for a longer explanation of this. The mysticism of writing is the Expressive/Inspirational School which encourages your to find you voice or connect with your muse. The practice of writing is the Technical/Teleological School which encourages you to learn the techniques (or best practices) of writing. But, no where, until just recently, was there a scientific school of storytelling.
Booker's book makes some huge strides toward a more scientific view of writing and the role of stories. But, before I get ahead of myself let me let me get a little more concrete and list the seven basic plots.
- Overcoming the Monster
- Rags to Riches
- The Quest
- Voyage and Return
- Comedy
- Tragedy
- Rebirth
Unfortunately, that doesn't help much. However, Booker spends the next 200 pages explaining these plots and providing ample detailed examples. To simplify things, consider the following. Obvious examples of Overcoming the Monster would include stories such as Beowulf, King Kong, Jaws, and Jurassic Park. But, the monster doesn't have to be a large thing that is chasing you. The monster might be someone or a group that is threatening you. It might be a plague or a famine. It could be debt or an addiction. The Overcoming the Monster plot is the archetypal situation in which the peace or predictability of your life is upset by a major threat which you do not understand and do not know how to address. And you need to figure out how to overcome this threat in order to survive and return to a life of peace and predictability. You may or may not be victorious in overcoming the monster, and there is something for the reader of the story to learn either way. You may overcome the monster and not be able to return to your earlier innocence. It doesn't take a great deal of imagination to see how the Overcoming the Monster plot represents hundreds, possibly thousands, of variations with different monsters and different outcomes. This is because the plot is a general outline of archetypal human experience and each story is an instantiation of that general outline in a specific circumstance.
Each of the seven basic plots could be expanded as I just did yielding endless variations and each variation, in turn, could yield endless more variations. This is why they are "basic plots". It is the archetypal nature of these experiences which plays out in the endless variety of situations that we call human experience. But how does the vast variety of stories from comic books to TV shows and films to novels and religious texts fit so neatly into these seven categories? The answer is that archetypes represent the fundamental units of human experience and it was human experience that produced these stories. So, you can think about stories as experiments that advance our understanding of human experience much like the ways that experiments in chemistry advance our understanding of chemistry.
Yes, I am being a little simplistic here. But, we are very early in our understanding of the science of stories and I am very early in my study of it. So, be patience as I will add more to this as I come to grips with it myself. It took Christopher Booker 35 years to write this book, and it took me dozens and dozens of hours to read it. I suspect it will take months, if not years before it all sinks in. So, I will hop over 700 pages, for now, and close with a quote from the book on page 700.
"One day, I believe, it will eventually be seen that for a long time that one of the most remarkable failures of our scientific approach to understanding the world was not to perceive that our urge to imagine stories is something just as governed by laws which lay it open to scientific investigation as the structure of the atom or the genome."
Thus begins the Scientific School of Storytelling. Stay tuned.
