Seven basic plots to screenwriting
SRVEN BASIC PLOTS TO SCREENWRITING
The meta-plot[edit]
The meta-plot begins with the anticipation stage, in which the hero is called to the adventure to come. This is followed by a dream stage, in which the adventure begins, the hero has some success, and has an illusion of invincibility. However, this is then followed by a frustration stage, in which the hero has his first confrontation with the enemy, and the illusion of invincibility is lost. This worsens in the nightmare stage, which is the climax of the plot, where hope is apparently lost. Finally, in the resolution, the hero overcomes his burden against the odds.
The key thesis of the book: "However many characters may appear in a story, its real concern is with just one: its hero. It is the one whose fate we identify with, as we see them gradually developing towards that state of self-realization which marks the end of the story. Ultimately it is in relation to this central figure that all other characters in a story take on their significance. What each of the other characters represents is really only some aspect of the inner state of the hero himself."
The plots[edit]
Overcoming the monster[edit]
Definition: The protagonist sets out to defeat an antagonistic force (often evil) that threatens the protagonist and/or protagonist's homeland.
Examples: Perseus, Theseus, Beowulf, Dracula, The War of the Worlds, Nicholas Nickleby, The Guns of Navarone, Seven Samurai (The Magnificent Seven), James Bond, Jaws, Star Wars, Naruto.
Rags to riches[edit]
Definition: The poor protagonist acquires power, wealth, and/or a mate, loses it all and gains it back, growing as a person as a result.
Examples: Cinderella, Aladdin, Jane Eyre, A Little Princess, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Moll Flanders, The Red and the Black, The Prince and the Pauper, The Ugly Duckling, The Gold Rush, The Jerk.
The quest[edit]
Definition: The protagonist and companions set out to acquire an important object or to get to a location. They face temptations and other obstacles along the way.
Examples: The Iliad, The Pilgrim's Progress, The Lord of the Rings, King Solomon's Mines, The Divine Comedy, Watership Down, The Aeneid, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Voyage and return[edit]
Definition: The protagonist goes to a strange land and, after overcoming the threats it poses or learning important lessons unique to that location, they return with experience.
Examples: Ramayana, Odyssey, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Orpheus, The Time Machine, Peter Rabbit, The Hobbit, Brideshead Revisited, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Gone with the Wind, The Third Man, The Lion King, Back to the Future, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Gulliver's Travels, Peter Pan, The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Comedy[edit]
Definition: Light and humorous character with a happy or cheerful ending; a dramatic work in which the central motif is the triumph over adverse circumstance, resulting in a successful or happy conclusion.[2] Booker stresses that comedy is more than humor. It refers to a pattern where the conflict becomes more and more confusing, but is at last made plain in a single clarifying event. The majority of romance films fall into this category.
Examples: The Wasps, Aurularia, The Arbitration, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, The Alchemist, Bridget Jones's Diary, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Big Lebowski.
Tragedy[edit]
Definition: The protagonist is a hero with a major character flaw or great mistake which is ultimately their undoing. Their unfortunate end evokes pity at their folly and the fall of a fundamentally good character.
Examples: Anna Karenina, Bonnie and Clyde, Carmen, Citizen Kane, John Dillinger, Jules et Jim, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Madame Bovary, Oedipus Rex, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Romeo and Juliet, Hamilton, The Great Gatsby.
Rebirth[edit]
Definition: An event forces the main character to change their ways and often become a better individual.
Examples: Pride and Prejudice, The Frog Prince, Beauty and the Beast, The Snow Queen, A Christmas Carol, The Secret Garden, Peer Gynt, Groundhog Day.
The Rule of Three[edit]
The third event in a series of events becomes "the final trigger for something important to happen." This pattern appears in childhood stories, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood.
In adult stories, the Rule of Three conveys the gradual resolution of a process that leads to transformation. This transformation can be downwards as well as upwards.
Booker asserts that the Rule of Three is expressed in four ways[citation needed]:
- The simple, or cumulative three, for example, Cinderella's three visits to the ball.
- The ascending three, where each event is of more significance than the preceding, for example, the hero must win first bronze, then silver, then gold objects.
- The contrasting three, where only the third has positive value, for example, The Three Little Pigs, two of whose houses are blown down by the Big Bad Wolf.
- The final or dialectical form of three, where, as with Goldilocks and her bowls of porridge, the first is wrong in one way, the second in an opposite way, and the third is "just right".[3]
Many academics, most notably author Christopher Booker, believe there are only seven basic narrative plots in all of storytelling – frameworks that are recycled again and again in fiction but populated by different settings, characters, and conflicts. Those seven types of story are:
- Overcoming the Monster
- Rags to Riches
- The Quest
- Voyage and Return
- Rebirth
- Comedy
- Tragedy
This list comes from Booker’s seminal book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. It took him 34 years of research and reading to complete the 700-page psychoanalytic tome. But where did the idea of a limited number of stories come from? Is it true? If so, how does that affect writers – all of whom strive to create their own unique narrative experiences and conflict? Let’s dig a little deeper into this idea.
Crunching story types and plot down to three
Although The Seven Basic Plots is the most frequently cited text today, Booker was not the first person to propose that there are a limited number of story types. A list made by Foster-Harris in 1959 claimed there are only three types of stories:
- Happy ending
- Unhappy ending
- Tragedy
While you can place just about every story you can think of into one of these three plot types, it’s overly simplistic, offering little in the way of observation of actual story structure. A simple display of the potential outcomes for the hero of a story, the Foster-Harris list sadly ignores much of the structural nuance in story beats that Booker’s list accommodates.
The Hedonometer: An emotional approach to narrative and story type
More recently (and perhaps intriguingly) the University of Vermont took a leaf from one of author Kurt Vonnegut’s theories and used powerful computer programs to analyze data from 1,737 fiction stories. The purpose was to track the emotional content of the plot by looking for words such as ‘tears,’ ‘laughed,’ ‘enemy,’ ‘poison’ and so on.
Throughout any story, they describe building happy emotions as rise, and sadder emotions as fall. Their results concluded that there were six basic story types:
- “Rags to riches” (rise).
- “Tragedy,” or “Riches to rags” (fall).
- “Man in a hole” (fall–rise).
- “Icarus” (rise–fall).
- “Cinderella” (rise–fall–rise).
- “Oedipus” (fall–rise–fall).
5 Elements Of A Great Screenplay
There are five basic but essential elements of every great story, no matter the type or genre. They enable screenwriters and novelists alike to capture their audience and craft a story worth telling. Like building blocks, they’re connected to each other to carry the load and balance out your story. We’ll go over each element and then show you how to begin writing. In the end, you’ll find a checklist for the five elements to test the strength of your screenplay.
The 5 elements that make up a great story
The ingredients of a great story are far from secret ingredients. Depending on which storytelling theory you consult, they might go by different names. For this introduction, we’re going to call them character, want and need, plot, structure, and conflict and resolution.
Character
Every story needs a hero. Your protagonist or main character determines what is happening in your story. Without the hero and their actions, there would be no story.
The main character will draw your audience in if they can identify with them and root for them. In other words, create a likable hero. Your protagonist will start out far from perfect but give them qualities to make them relatable and the audience will want to keep going. A character is well-rounded when we perceive them as believable or authentic.
Humans are complex beings. An interesting character has at least one thing they need to fix, a problem or a flaw. As the title The Dark Knight suggests, Batman is a flawed, even tragic hero.
A thing that the hero needs to fix allows the story to develop and move forward. The problem can come in the form of an opponent, foe or villain, an antagonist to complement the protagonist. Secondary characters further populate the story to support the plot. They enable the hero’s progression or transformation of character.
Want and need
A hero who lacks nothing makes for a boring tale. In every great story, their want and need define the protagonist. These are the things that motivate the main character in their actions: their wishes, dreams, and desires. In Ready Player One, Parzival is on a quest to find an Easter egg inside the oasis.
The object of the hero’s pursuit, what they want, is one thing. But what turns out to be the true solution to their flaw or problem is another: it’s their need that ends up changing their life. Other names for this paired story element are premise and theme, A story and B story, or also external and internal story.
The external journey can be specific to the main character and feature exciting action. The internal journey is more reflective and universal, something the hero has to learn or change about themselves. Fixing the hero’s flaw can mean finding love, trust, faith, or human connection, taking on responsibility, overcoming fear, acceptance, sacrifice, or mere survival. The theme of Ready Player One is the hero making connections in real life, not inside the simulation.
Plot
The storyline or plot of your writing is a series of events in which actions and occurrences cause and effect later ones. The plot ties the events in your story together, directing the audience towards the question: why does it all happen? Together with character, the plot affects everything in your writing.
The plot of every great story follows certain patterns or story archetypes. Their exact number varies with different storytelling theories. For Aristotle, only simple and complex plots existed. Modern approaches feature a higher number of distinct story archetypes or master plots. The important lesson is the common denominators shared by stories of each of these plots.
One such archetype is the quest plot or hero’s journey, also termed monomyth by American professor of literature Joseph Campbell. A hero goes on an adventure or quest to find something, obtains victory after a decisive crisis, and returns fundamentally changed or transformed – think of Don Quixote or The Wizard of Oz.
The plot is not a genre. Romance as a genre, for example, classifies love stories in the broadest range. As a plot, romance features the common denominators of an encounter of two people by chance or fate. After they fall in love, they have to overcome various obstacles to be together before it ends either happily ever after (Pretty Woman) or tragically (Romeo and Juliet).
Structure
By now you have the who and what of your story: your characters and the hero’s want and need as well as what is going to happen to them. The element of structure defines what goes where giving order to things and creating a unified whole.
Plot and structure are closely related. The plot determines the events that happen, the structure defines when they occur. Within the simple structure of beginning, middle, and end, timing is everything.
Aristotle called these three parts of a story setup, confrontation and resolution. This is the so-called three-act-structure, defining major plot points and transitions from one act to another. Your narrative will feature additional events with immediate or delayed effects. A term to describe these is story beats. They are units of plot linking the events of the story together. So-called beat sheets illustrate these units and their timing for different types of plots.
The number and distribution of story beats vary with storytelling schools of thought. Yet they always seek to achieve the perfect rise and fall of action that will have the audience at the edge of their seat.
If you are wanting to learn more about how to correctly structure your screenplay, including proper page margins, how to format where things take place, scene headings, and how to correctly format dialogue and more, check out our ultimate guide to formatting!
Conflict and resolution
Plot creates tension, which makes a story interesting and entertaining. Two people falling in love and spending the rest of their life together is a love story. But a hero pursuing their love despite denial is much more intriguing. In Leaving Las Vegas, the relationship between Ben and Sera is doomed by the exact rule that allows them to live together: they’ve vowed to not change each other’s lives.
Introduce tension in your story through opposition. An antagonist can be a villain, a rival, a character flaw or external circumstances such as society as a whole. You’ll be able to increase the tension by raising the opposing force more and more.
Conflict drives your hero out of their current circumstances and towards change. As they develop, their need takes prevalence over their want until they’re truly changed at the resolution.
How to begin writing your story or screenplay
Knowing these five components of great stories is good and well, but which element comes first? How do you begin writing? You can avoid common problems that arise at various writing stages if you choose either character or plot as a starting point. Define your hero by their actions, or create a protagonist for a certain plot.
Start with character
Your audience will follow your hero through thick and thin, so it makes sense to start with them. Make your main character well-rounded and give them a problem or flaw, a want they pursue and a need they have to discover or learn.
Proactive characters make great heroes: they pursue their want, or what they think they need. Then you introduce the opposition, obstacles or antagonist, creating conflict. Over the course of events, they will arrive at the root of their problems, discovering their true need.
Create a main character bound for major change with a specific problem or flaw; make them unable to remain in a status quo; going after a concrete goal against a strong opposing force; which will lead them to a realization about themselves. As you define your protagonist, a plot for them will also begin to crystalize.
Start with plot
The opposite might seem counter-intuitive, yet putting plot before character goes all the way back to Aristotle. He felt that a hero’s happiness or misery depended on their actions. You can let a protagonist talk all you want in your story, the audience will know and judge them by their actions.
If you know what kind of story you’re going to write and need to populate it with characters, story beats and a beat sheet are a good starting point. Chart the changes that will occur, then play psychologist and conjure an image of the person that will undergo them, and why – and you’ll arrive at your story’s hero and other characters.
Putting plot first might strike you as formulaic, like choosing a pre-made structure. Writers rejecting this approach feel they can’t create anything new by working with an existing story archetype and its structure.
Yet bestselling works of fiction hit the sweet spot on both plot and character, as well as style and theme – their pleasing pattern of story beats have been proven by algorithms, as The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel tells us.
Story archetypes and plot structure are not a rigid construction superimposed on your writing. They’re a craft that can enable the smooth flow of a plot. Your specific characters and their journey are what makes your story unique.
The problem of starting elsewhere
Don’t get us wrong: there are many more ways to go about beginning work on your screenplay or novel. J. R. R. Tolkien created whole languages before he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings.
Yet world-building can be exhaustive work and in vain if you can’t manage to bring interesting characters to life in the universe you created or fail to come up with an enticing plot to take place in your fantasy world.
We perceive stories as ‘strong’ when they feature well-rounded characters and a balanced, symmetrical plot. Stories where an otherworldly setting or extraordinary structure takes precedence but characters and story arch remain flat strike us as ‘weak’.
Sure, movies like Memento, Forrest Gump, 12 Monkeys, Fight Club, Goodfellas, or Citizen Kane break with story-telling traditions we’ve described so far. But master the basics before you begin writing without a protagonist or a structure outside of three acts.
Checklist: Make sure your story includes these 5 elements
In the following mini cheat sheet, we’ll summarize the five elements of great stories in the form of a checklist. You can use it to test your ideas for a screenplay or novel to see you haven’t forgotten anything or prioritized minor over major elements.
Conclusion
We encourage you to use the five-story elements we’ve described above when drafting your novel or to test your ongoing screenplay project. To transition from theory to practical application, it’s also helpful to apply character, want and need, plot, structure as well as conflict and resolution to existing works: can you detect the patterns in blockbuster movies and literary classics and identify the five elements in popular titles?
This article is the first in a series about storytelling theory. In future instances, we’ll return to the elements that make up great stories for a more in-depth analysis, consult Aristotle again as well as other gurus of story and dramatic theory, and give you more practical tips on how to create compelling characters or plot your screenplay. In the meantime, check out our suggested reading below.
How to Write a Script
Writing a feature spec script—or even the script for a short film—can seem overwhelming, but it’s manageable if you break it down into methodical steps. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating your movie script:
1. Write Your Logline
A logline is a single sentence that answers the question: What is my story about? It should encompass the plot’s major dramatic question—although it’s not always posed as a question. This logline can be revised as you work towards a final draft of your screenplay, but it’s a helpful guiding light as you get deeper into the writing process.
Answer the following questions to help create a logline:
- 1. How does your protagonist get involved in the story?
- 2. What conflict arises to challenge your main character and move the story forward?
- 3. What is the world of your story? What makes this story different, interesting, or suspenseful?
In 50 words or less, combine the above information into a single sentence. Try not to use your character’s name—say what they are instead, i.e. a poor student or a frazzled banker. Don’t give any spoilers. Use the samples below for guidance:
- 1. The Magicians (2009) by Lev Grossman: After discovering that magic is real, a college student enters the world of his favorite childhood novels to fight a force of evil that has taken residence there.
- 2. Silence of the Lambs (1988) by Thomas Harris: In order to catch a killer who skins his victims, a young FBI agent must develop a relationship with a serial killer who may be even more dangerous.
- 3. One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez: In a town closed off to the rest of the world, seven generations of the Buendía family live through births, deaths, marriages, and the devastating political turmoil that modernity brings.
2. Create an Outline
Begin creating an outline by writing down the main events of your script in order. You can do this in a traditional outline format over one or two pages, or if you have the space, you can write your sentences on index cards and post them on a wall to make it easier to view and manipulate the parts. Each event should be a single, short sentence (e.g. “Danny gets shot in the leg”). Your sole dramatic question is the force that will shape the main plotline of your story. Screenwriters calls this the throughline.
Learn about the basic structures that underlie most stories, as they will most likely save you from numerous re-writes later. Most screenplays take place over three acts, with an inciting incident leading to a conflict or struggle and ending with some kind of resolution or change.
3. Build a Treatment
Consider your treatment a beefed-up prose version of your outline, one that reads more like a short story. If you’re shopping your script around, a treatment is what you might use to gauge interest; it can also be a good exercise to see if the story works the way you’re hoping it does in your head. Your personal artistic vision comes into play with the treatment, so build out your world and your characters as lush as you’d like.
Learn more about writing treatments in our how-to guide here.
4. Write Your Screenplay
Happy with your treatment? Here’s where the hard work comes in. Try to remember all the rules you’ve heard before: Show, don’t tell. Write in the present tense. Adhere to proper formatting. Try not to do too much editing while you write. Let your ideas flow and then structure them once you’ve got everything on the page.
5. Format Your Screenplay
Script templates are easy to find online, and there’s plenty of screenwriting software that will automatically arrange your writing into a screenplay format. Final Draft is the tool of choice for most professional screenwriters. Industry standard for a script format is 12-pt Courier font, with a 1 inch right margin, 1.5 inch left margin, and 1 inch margins at top and bottom.
6. Edit Your Screenplay
Author and screenwriter Neil Gaiman says that writing is a kind of explosion. When you get to the end of it, you get to walk around and look at the shrapnel and the damage it did. You get to see who died. And you get to see how it worked—that’s the editing process.
In the editing process, your goal is clarity. When you return to what you’ve written, pretend that you’re someone who’s never read it before. What would their response be? Don’t focus on perfection, keep your attention on the story. If you can’t get any objectivity, give it to a trusted reader. Ask them for advice, but don’t automatically accept their suggestions.
One method of editing is to identify problem areas that you’d like to improve, then mark all of those areas with a colored highlighter, and set a goal for yourself to get the entire script back to colorless. Look especially for sections where description is sloppy or overwritten, and reconsider sequences where someone acts out of character. Are you relying too much on narration for exposition? Try cutting all narration and see how it is altered. Does the narrative become easier to follow? Is it made less or more interesting by the elimination of narration?
6 Useful Terms Every Screenwriter Should Know
Screenwriting is a profession that involves its own technical language. Here are a few of the terms essential to understanding the craft:
- 1. Scene heading: Also known as a slug line, a scene heading appears at the top of each new scene and includes the following information: “EXT.” or “INT.” (abbreviations for “exterior” and “interior”), the location, and the time of day. For example: “INT. ABANDONED WAREHOUSE - NIGHT”
- 2. Action line: Action lines describe what a character is doing in a scene.
- 3. Parenthetical: A parenthetical is a small direction included before a character’s line that suggests how the line should be delivered.
- 4. Transition: “FADE IN” precedes the very first line of your script. “FADE OUT” marks the end. Other transitions, like “DISSOLVE TO” or “MATCH CUT TO,” may be used throughout your script.
- 5. Voiceover: Abbreviated to “V.O.,” voiceover is used when an unseen narrator interjects into the scene.
- 6. Camera angle: Though typically avoided by writers, camera angles can be noted in a screenplay if they’re essential to the way a scene unfolds, perhaps enabling the delivery of a joke or big reveal.
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