The Basic Plots of Literature
Sunday, February 8th, 2004Whether there’s 1 or 36, the “why?” of the different plots is what’s important.
The universal plot is “the canonical view that the basic elements of plot revolve around a problem dealt with in sequence: ‘Exposition - Rising Action - Climax - Falling Action - Denouement’.”
The most used set is Ronald Tobias’s 20 Master Plots.
The least understood, but to my mind most powerful, set is Polti’s 36 Dramatic situations. Both Polti and Tobias are on my shelf. Tobias is the one you buy so you can use it on your next story. Polti is the one you read, slowly–its damn dry–over the next month or so.
Scratch your head. Wonder why anyone would recommend this tripe.
Pull it off your shelf two years from now. Think it might be useful. Find it frustrating because you are pretty sure you aren’t getting all you can out of it.
Ten years later, you think you’re finally starting to understand. Use it like a tarot deck. Wish you had understood ten years ago.
At least that’s been my Odyssey.
The cool thing about Polti in the age of “boy meets girl, how many more plots do we need?” is that it’s like a sumo wrestler going back to study techniques written down two hundred years ago, then forgotten. But the techniques still work and when they show up suddenly in the ring, its like fire has been rediscovered.
Polti has enumerated dramatic structures about duty and family that have been largely ignored. If you want to write Hollywood “boy meets girl,” nothing wrong with that but you don’t need this book for help: our culture is already saturated with this kind of simple message. You can do BMG in your sleep.
If you want to work with more complex situations and motivations, give this book a gander. Find it at the library for the first read, but it’s turned out to be a long term companion for me.