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68 Structure Bp Seven Basic Plots Story Structures

Seven Basic Plots

Christopher Booker's seven story types.

What it is

In 2004 the British journalist Christopher Booker argued that nearly every story ever told runs on one of seven patterns: a monster defeated, a nobody who rises, a quest, a journey out and home again, a comedy of confusion resolved, a tragedy, and a redemption. Each pattern carries a promise about how the book will end, and readers feel that promise from the opening chapters, whether or not they've heard of Booker. That's what makes the list useful to a working novelist. Naming which pattern your premise sets up tells you what your ending owes. Naming two or three at once tells you where a hybrid draft will have to choose.

The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories is a book of more than seven hundred pages. Continuum published it in London in 2004, and it came out in the United States at the end of that year. It does two things, and it helps to keep them apart from the start. The first is a taxonomy, a sorting of stories into types. It claims that the stories of the world, from Greek myth and fairy tale to the novel, opera and Hollywood film, fall into seven recurring plot types, each with a recognizable sequence of stages. Almost everyone has heard of this part, and it's the part a novelist can use on a Tuesday afternoon. The second is a theory, built on the psychology of Carl Jung. It claims that the seven are really surface forms of one deeper story, about a person growing from immaturity into wholeness, and that much of the literature of the last two centuries has gone wrong by losing touch with that story. Most reviewers argued with this part, and some of them were scathing. This page takes both in turn. It leaves out the wider question of how many plots there are and the other people who have tried to count them, from Georges Polti's thirty-six dramatic situations to the folklorists' index of tale types. Plot covers that history.

Christopher Booker (1937 to 2019) was a journalist rather than an academic. He was the founding editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye in 1961, and he wrote political sketches for the BBC's That Was The Week That Was from 1962. From 1990 until shortly before his death he wrote a weekly column for The Sunday Telegraph. His earlier books included The Neophiliacs (1969), a hostile study of the fantasies of 1950s and 1960s Britain, and a history of the European Union. He was a combative conservative columnist, and several reviewers read the later parts of The Seven Basic Plots in that light. By his own account the book took him thirty-four years. Every major review repeats the figure, and Michiko Kakutani's in The New York Times is careful to say it's the length he says it took. Adam Mars-Jones, reviewing it in The Observer, called the enterprise an obsession and noted that it required a reading list roughly equal to the history of literature. That length matters to how you use the book. What you're holding is one man's lifetime of reading, retold and organized, with an argument running underneath. It isn't a craft manual with exercises.

Booker's question was never "how do I plot a novel?" It was two older questions run together. Why do stories from cultures and centuries that never touched each other keep falling into the same shapes? And why do human beings tell stories at all? The subtitle names what the book is about, and the seven plots are the evidence. His answer, in short, is that the shapes recur because they're built into the human mind, and they exist to show us a picture of a person becoming whole. That answer is what pulls the book away from the craft shelf and into literary and psychological theory. It's also why a novelist can take the first half and leave the second without losing much they would use.

The seven, in this page's own words (the stage-by-stage breakdowns in Booker's chapters are his, and the book is the place to read them):

Booker doesn't stop at seven, which surprises readers who know only the title. The published contents list two further chapters, placed not in Part One with the seven but in Part Three, among his chapters on stories that miss their mark. One is Rebellion against "the One", which runs, in his chapter subtitle, from the Book of Job to Nineteen Eighty-Four: a hero defies an all-powerful authority and is finally brought to submit to it. The other is the Mystery, the detective story, which Denis Dutton's review describes as Booker's category for a fairly recent invention. Dutton calls the extra two unexpected. Booker treats them as later arrivals, standing outside the original seven. If you write crime fiction, notice that one of the biggest commercial genres on the shelf is, in this scheme, an afterthought.

The list is only the way in. The argument starts when Booker turns from the seven to what they share, and his first move is a common shape. Across the plots he keeps finding the same sequence of movements. A call or a temptation sets the hero off, and in an early phase everything seems to go well. Then it starts to go wrong, and a phase of real nightmare follows in which all seems lost. Last comes a final release, which in the happy plots is a thrilling escape and a resolution, and in tragedy is destruction. Summaries of the book often call this the meta-plot. The stage names are Booker's, and a reader of this table will notice how closely the shape matches the beat elements. The early success sits where many structures put the midpoint false victory, the nightmare is the all is lost moment, and the release is the climax and resolution.

His second move folds the seven down even further. According to Kasia Boddy's review in The Telegraph, Booker tells the reader at the end of his eleventh chapter that the plots are only different views of one basic drama, which begins with the hero constricted in some way and ends with a final opening out into life. Kakutani's review adds that he places five of the seven under the umbrella of comedy, in the deep sense: each traces a hero from immaturity to maturity and ends in restored order. Mars-Jones puts it most simply. Underneath everything there are two master stories, comedy and tragedy. In one the ego is overcome and proportion restored. In the other the distortion grows so severe that the person who suffers it must be destroyed.

The theory that holds all this together comes from Carl Jung, and a novelist should understand it before taking any of Booker's judgments on trust. What follows is only what Booker does with these ideas. Archetype covers Jung properly, along with Vladimir Propp's very different idea of character as function. In Booker's reading, however many characters a story has, it's really about one person, the hero, and the others are best understood as aspects of the hero's own inner state. The forces opposing the hero are dark figures, and what makes them dark is egotism. The monster, the tyrant, the witch and the seducer are all images of the self-centered ego that the hero must overcome, inside as well as out. Booker gives a whole chapter to what he calls the dark power. Against the dark figures stand the light figures, the helpers, guides and the beloved, who embody what the hero lacks. The goal, the "complete happy ending" of his Part Two, is balance. Booker divides the qualities a whole person needs into a masculine pair, which reviewers summarize as strength and order, and a feminine pair, feeling and understanding. The hero, usually a man in his examples, must integrate the feminine values he lacks, which the heroine or princess represents, and the marriage at the end of a comedy or a fairy tale symbolizes that union. Tragedy is the story of someone who never gets there, held back, as Kakutani quotes him, by a fatal flaw or weakness, and stuck in incompleteness. Whether it's reached or missed, the end state is selfhood. If that sounds like Joseph Campbell, it's close kin. Hero's Journey has Campbell's monomyth and the long argument about whether any such pattern is universal.

In Part Three, "Missing the Mark", the book changes character, and every reviewer noticed. Booker argues there that storytellers changed about two hundred years ago, beginning with the Romantic movement. From then on, they told stories from the point of view of the ego rather than the whole self. The archetypal shapes survived, because they can't be escaped, but the stories stopped reaching their proper resolutions. Heroes who should have been seen as monsters of egotism were celebrated, and endings that should have opened out into life went nowhere or dissolved into sex and violence. His chapter titles tell the story. One treats Thomas Hardy as a case history in losing the plot, another follows the passive ego from Chekhov to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a third follows the active ego from the Marquis de Sade to The Terminator. The verdicts that follow are the passages reviewers quoted most. Booker calls Proust's novel sequence "the greatest monument to human egotism in the history of story-telling", in words quoted by both Kakutani and Dutton. Kakutani adds his complaints that Chekhov's characters never become strong enough to take control of their own lives, and that Joyce's Ulysses signifies defeat and the trivialized world of the rootless ego. Part Four, "Why We Tell Stories", widens the argument from literature to culture at large, and Boddy reports that it takes in soap operas, the metric system, feminism and political correctness. Whether you agree with any of this is up to you. If you want to use the taxonomy, notice what the second half does. It turns a description of what stories have done into a rule about what they ought to do, and that rule is Booker's, not the reader's.

Why it matters

It tells you what your opening has promised. Every one of Booker's plots implies an ending. Overcoming the Monster owes the reader the monster's destruction and a home made safe. Rags to Riches owes a second, harder-won rise. The Quest owes the goal, reached at cost. Voyage and Return owes the way home. Comedy owes the moment of recognition and the union. Tragedy owes the fall, and Rebirth owes the breaking of the spell. Readers don't need the vocabulary to feel these debts. They feel them from the first chapters, because the opening of a story tells them which shape they're in. Asking "which of the seven does my premise set up?" is a fast way of discovering what your reader promise actually is, as opposed to what you think it is.

It names a hybrid. Most commercial novels are more than one plot at once: a quest with a comedy inside it, or a voyage and return whose hero is also being reborn. Booker's labels let you say so in two words. That matters because hybrids fail in a specific way. Each strand quietly promises its own ending, and the draft delivers one of them while the reader was waiting for another. Naming the strands is the first step to deciding which one governs the last chapter.

It checks the middle. The shared shape, where early success sours into frustration and then nightmare, is a useful check on a middle that sags. If your hero never has a phase in which things go well, the frustration has nothing to fall from. If the nightmare never arrives, the release has nothing to release from. The beat elements on this table, Midpoint, All Is Lost and Climax, treat those turning points in detail.

It asks what the ending changes in the person. Booker insists that each plot is really about a hero becoming whole. Stripped of the Jungian language, that's a demand that the ending change someone. Character Arc makes the same demand, and Booker's tragedies are a long gallery of what a negative arc looks like.

The categories absorb almost anything, which limits what they can prove. A scheme in which Jaws and Beowulf are the same story is broad enough that nearly every novel can be fitted somewhere, and most can be fitted in two or three places. That breadth makes the labels useful as shorthand and useless as proof. Dutton's review makes the point through Booker's "Rule of Three", the claim that sets of three run through stories everywhere. Once you look for threes, Dutton says, you find them, the way a believer in astrology finds Virgos, and Booker shows no interest in counter-evidence.

The plots don't generate anything. Knowing your book is a Rebirth tells you what kind of ending to build. It tells you nothing about who your character is, what spell they're under or what breaks it. All the work of a novel happens below the level of the label.

The gendered scheme is built in, not added on. Booker's account of wholeness depends on masculine and feminine values, and in his reading the female characters largely exist to supply the qualities the male hero must absorb. That's more than a side issue, because it shapes his verdicts on individual stories, and a writer who adopts the framework wholesale adopts the gender scheme too.

The judgments are not craft rules. A novel that ends unresolved, or whose hero is never redeemed, or which refuses the marriage, fails only by Booker's theory. His taxonomy has no quarrel with it, and plenty of widely read fiction lives on those refusals.

Four reviewers said much the same thing. The major reviews appeared between November 2004 and May 2005, and almost all of them praised the first half, quarreled with the theory, and rejected the second half. Two of the most quoted, from The Observer and The Telegraph, are no longer reachable by automated readers on their live sites, so this page read them through archived copies in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, as it did the Washington Post and New York Times reviews. Adam Mars-Jones, in The Observer on November 21, 2004, called the book peculiar, repetitive and near-barmy, and occasionally rather good. His central charge is the scorecard. Booker sets up criteria for art and ends by condemning Rigoletto, The Cherry Orchard, Wagner, Proust, Joyce, Kafka and D. H. Lawrence while praising Crocodile Dundee, E.T. and Terminator 2. He presses the gender objection hardest. In Booker's scheme the female characters' proper function is to represent qualities the hero absorbs, so Booker never explains what stories offer women readers. He also catalogs errors, including a garbled account of William Burroughs's cut-up method, a misdescribed ending of Jaws and a Star Wars placed in the future. Even so, he judged the chapter on Oedipus Rex and Hamlet the best in the book. Kasia Boddy, in The Telegraph the same day, notes that Booker's claims to universality would have been stronger with non-Western examples, and that the plain fact of literary influence explains much of what he attributes to the unconscious. The Aeneid, Tom Jones and Ulysses resemble the Odyssey because Virgil, Fielding and Joyce read Homer. She finds his readings of individual books careless, citing an ending of Middlemarch that the novel doesn't have, and she quotes his remark that during the Second World War men were again free to play a fully masculine role and women could again become feminine. Michiko Kakutani, in The New York Times on April 15, 2005, found the book sometimes absorbing and often blockheaded. Her objection is about originality. Most of the theory, she argues, comes from Jung, Freud, Campbell, Bruno Bettelheim, James Frazer, A. C. Bradley and Iona and Peter Opie, not always acknowledged. She also calls the second half tendentious, because Booker judges works by how closely they follow his archetypes and dismisses the rest as flawed or perverse. Her advice to readers was to keep the first half and drop the second. Denis Dutton, in The Washington Post on May 8, 2005, a philosopher who edited the journal Philosophy and Literature, gives the warmest account of Booker as a reteller of stories. He praises the clarity of Booker's prose and his range. His objection is to the explanation, because not every villain is an image of egotism. The shark in Jaws and the Cyclops in the Odyssey are frightening because they eat people, and sometimes, he writes, a monster is just a monster. His alternative is the strongest argument against the whole archetypal project. Houses share a layout because people need to sleep, cook and wash, not because there's an archetypal floor plan. In the same way, stories share shapes because people care about love, death, family, justice and danger, and there are only so many logical ways for those to go, as Aristotle had already seen.

The admirers deserve a hearing too. John Bayley, the critic and novelist, reviewed the book in The Spectator on November 13, 2004. According to the excerpt the publisher reprints, he called it a deep-flowing masterpiece of critical assessment. Fay Weldon's endorsement, also on the publisher's page, called it extraordinary and exhilarating, and said the novel would never look quite the same to her again. The philosopher Roger Scruton, writing on Wagner in The New Criterion in February 2005, called it in passing a brilliant summary of storytelling. Even the hostile reviewers conceded the first half. Kakutani called it informative, Dutton called it one of the most diverting works on storytelling he had read, and Mars-Jones thought it occasionally rather good. Almost nobody disputed that the seven shapes are real and recognizable. The argument was about what they mean, and whether they justify Booker's verdicts.

Real-world examples

Booker's own opening move: Beowulf beside Spielberg's Jaws (1975)

This reading is Booker's own, from his first chapter, and it shows his method more clearly than anything else in the book.

As Dutton's review recounts, Booker starts from a summer in 1975, when audiences lined up to see a film about a predatory shark terrorizing a small seaside resort. Three men go to sea in a small boat, kill the monster after a bloody climax, and restore peace to the town. Then he sets it beside Beowulf, the Old English poem in which a hall is terrorized by Grendel, a monster from a nearby lake who tears men apart. Grendel's attacks go on until a hero arrives and kills the monster, and peace is restored. Same plot, he argues, separated by more than a thousand years and by everything else that makes the two works different. From that pairing he builds the whole of Overcoming the Monster, and from Overcoming the Monster, the book.

This page leaves Jaws itself alone and looks only at what Booker's comparison claims and what it doesn't. Two other pages on this table use Jaws for different arguments. Stakes uses Benchley's novel and Spielberg's film for the way a private fear is bolted onto a public danger, and Conflict uses the novel for three kinds of opposition in one summer.

What the comparison claims is that the resemblance isn't an accident of influence, because Spielberg wasn't adapting Beowulf. What it doesn't establish is the Jungian conclusion Booker draws from it. Dutton's objection lands right here. The shark isn't an image of anybody's ego. A story about a town under threat from something that eats people takes the shape it takes because of what such a threat is. Mars-Jones's complaint that Booker misdescribes how Jaws ends is a smaller point, and a telling one. The method is so interested in the shared outline that it gets careless about the specific film.

For a writer, the useful half is the lesson of that opening move. If your premise is a community under threat from something, the reader already knows the shape of the deal: early confidence, a costly reversal, a final confrontation in which the threat is destroyed, and a return to safety. You may subvert any of those. You can't pretend the reader isn't expecting them.

Booker's verdicts on E.T., the Terminator films and Proust: the taxonomy turned into a scorecard

Again, the readings are Booker's, as the reviewers report them. What this page examines is what his method does when it starts grading.

Kakutani describes Booker's account of Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) as a classic coming-of-age pattern. The boy Elliott's meeting with the alien, his alter ego, helps him grow up, makes him show leadership and brings harmony back to his broken family. She reports him reading James Cameron's The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) as moving, violently but inexorably, toward rebirth and redemption. Booker offers these as successes, stories that still reach the archetypal resolution.

On the other side of the ledger sit Proust, Chekhov, Joyce and much of the modern canon, faulted for egotism, passivity or failure to resolve. The scorecard reaches inside individual films as well. Mars-Jones reports that Star Wars fails in Booker's eyes because it doesn't liberate the anima (the feminine principle Jung located in a man's psyche), and that the original Terminator falls short because its heroine has to free herself, which, in Booker's scheme, won't do.

Booker's scorecard is the clearest example on record of the taxonomy being used against its own evidence. In Part One, his examples are drawn freely from every century, including the two he later condemns. Boddy noticed that most of the stories he used to establish the plots come from the very period he goes on to call fallen. Then in Part Three the same shapes become a test that a novel passes or fails. A working writer can borrow the first use and decline the second without any inconsistency. The plots describe what readers recognize. They don't tell you that an unresolved ending is a moral failure. A novel that ends where Chekhov's plays end is wrong about nothing except Booker's theory.

Stephen King's 11/22/63 (2011): four of the seven in one novel, and a choice of endings

This reading is this page's own, not Booker's, and it gives away how the novel ends.

Scribner published Stephen King's 11/22/63 on November 8, 2011. Jake Epping, an English teacher in Maine, is shown a passage in the pantry of a friend's diner that opens onto the same September morning in 1958. He's recruited to live in the past until November 1963 and stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Run Booker's labels over it and at least four plots are visibly present. It's a Voyage and Return: a man steps out of his own world into a strange one, is enchanted by it, finds it turning against him, and must get home. It's a Quest, with a single distant goal, years away, pursued through ordeals. It's an Overcoming the Monster story with a historical monster at its center, as Jake tracks Lee Harvey Oswald. And in its long Texas middle, where Jake settles in a small town and falls in love with the school librarian, Sadie, it's a Comedy in Booker's sense: two people kept apart by a deception that can't be explained.

Each of those strands promises a different ending. The quest promises success, the monster story the monster's defeat, the voyage a return home, and the comedy a union. King can't pay all four, so the novel's ending is where he chooses. Jake succeeds, but Sadie dies, and the world he returns to has been ruined by his success. So he goes back to undo it, which means giving her up. The quest and the monster plot are paid and then deliberately unpaid. The voyage and return is paid in full, at the price of the comedy.

King's own record shows how real that choice was for him. On his website he published an alternative final dispatch, a local newspaper column describing Sadie's eightieth birthday party in a life Jake never entered. In the published novel he went further, letting Jake meet her again as an old woman at a celebration in her honor, and dance with her. King's afterword credits his son, the novelist Joe Hill, with the idea that the two should meet once more. That last scene is a small, late payment on the comedy's promise, made without breaking the voyage's, and it shows what Booker's labels are for. They won't tell you what kind of book you've written. They will show you which debts are still outstanding when you reach the last chapter.

Jojo Moyes's Me Before You (2012): the promise the opening makes and the ending refuses

This reading is also this page's own, and it reveals the ending. If you haven't read the novel and mean to, skip to the next heading.

Michael Joseph published Jojo Moyes's Me Before You in Britain on January 5, 2012. Pamela Dorman Books brought it out in the United States at the end of that year. Louisa Clark, who has never left her small town, takes a job as carer to Will Traynor, a once-adventurous man paralyzed in an accident and bitter about it. She discovers that he has arranged to end his life at an assisted-dying clinic in Switzerland in six months, and she sets out to change his mind. They fall in love. He goes ahead anyway, and leaves her the means to live the life he wanted for her.

In Booker's terms, the opening sets up a Comedy: two mismatched people, an antagonism that softens, a secret that keeps them apart, and a reader trained by a whole shelf of romances to expect the recognition and the union. The novel doesn't deliver it. What it delivers instead is Louisa's Rebirth. A woman living a narrow, half-asleep life is woken up by another person, and the book's last pages show her in Paris, opening out into the world. Will's own story, seen from outside, is closer to a tragedy that he chooses with his eyes open.

Moyes knew she was refusing the obvious promise. In a Goodreads interview in July 2013, she said that at one point she had called her agent proposing a book with two endings, so that readers could choose. She was told to write the book she had planned. She defended the ending as true to the characters, and said she disliked love stories in which the reader knows from page thirty that everything will be all right.

The seven make this kind of diagnosis easy. A writer who wants to break a plot's promise can do it, and this novel's readership shows how powerfully it can work. It has to be done knowingly and paid for elsewhere. Here it's paid for by making the rebirth complete enough that the ending is a different kind of satisfaction rather than none. A writer who breaks the promise without noticing it has merely written a disappointing romance.

An everyday scenario: Slack Water, three plots and no decision

You have a finished draft called Slack Water. Hanne Merrow, a hydrographic surveyor, takes a six-month contract to chart the silting harbor at Enderley. She has never visited the tidal town, and she means to leave the moment the survey is done. Two beta readers liked it until the last fifty pages. One said the ending "came from nowhere", and the other said she "wanted it to end two chapters earlier". So run the seven over it, one strand at a time.

Your opening chapters are a Voyage and Return. A stranger arrives in an odd, closed little world with its own rules about tides and boats and who drinks where, and every early scene underlines that she's passing through. The reader has been promised a way home.

Your middle is a Comedy. Hanne and the harbormaster, Abel Lodd, loathe each other over whose charts are right, and the book spends a hundred pages working that loathing into something else. The reader has been promised a recognition and a union.

Your ending is a Rebirth. It turns out Hanne has been living numb since a death she never talks about, and in the final chapters the town breaks the spell. She grieves at last, and she decides to stay.

Nothing in the draft is badly written. The problem is that two strands each made a promise, and the last fifty pages paid a third thing that neither of them asked for. The reader who wanted it to end two chapters earlier was waiting for the comedy's payoff, which came there. The reader who felt the ending came from nowhere was waiting for the return, and got a rebirth that the first two-thirds had never planted.

The repair is a decision, not a rewrite. If the rebirth is the book, plant it. Let the death leak into the first act, so the reader understands early that what Hanne is passing through is not Enderley but her own grief. Then the voyage becomes the surface story that hides the rebirth, and the comedy becomes what breaks the spell. If the voyage is the book, let her leave, and let the comedy be the thing it costs her. Either way, the three labels have told you where the seams are and which ending each reader was owed.

Try it yourself

This takes about an hour and works best on a draft you've finished, or on a premise you're about to commit to.

  1. Write your ending in one sentence. Don't describe the climax. Describe what's true on the last page: who is where, with whom, and what has happened to the threat, the goal, the spell or the misunderstanding.
  2. Name the plot your ending pays. Using the descriptions above, decide which of the seven your last page completes. A monster destroyed and home made safe; a second, harder rise; a goal reached at cost; a return home; a recognition and a union; a fall; a spell broken. If the sentence fits none of them, that tells you something, and it isn't necessarily a fault.
  3. Name the plot your first chapters promise. Reread only your opening, and ask what a reader who knew nothing else would expect the ending to be. Write it down as one of the seven.
  4. Compare steps 2 and 3. If they match, move on. If they don't, you have either a deliberate subversion or an accidental one. Write one sentence saying which, and if it's deliberate, what the reader gets instead of what they were promised.
  5. List every strand that makes its own promise. Most novels run two or three of the seven at once. For each one, write the ending it implies. Then mark which one governs the last chapter, which ones are paid along the way, and which are refused. A refused strand needs a reason on the page.
  6. Find the early success. Booker's shared shape has a phase where things go well before they go wrong, so find the chapter where your hero is winning. If there's none, the reversal in your middle has nothing to fall from. See Midpoint.
  7. Find the nightmare and the release. Mark the point of deepest danger and the moment the hero gets out of it, by their own effort. Check both against All Is Lost and Climax, which treat them properly.
  8. Ask Dutton's question of your antagonist. Booker would have every opponent stand for the hero's own egotism. Ask instead what your antagonist actually wants, and why. If the answer is appetite, territory or survival, you don't need to give them a symbolic meaning. See Antagonist.
  9. Check what your heroine is for. If your resolution depends on a woman who exists mainly to supply what the hero lacks, decide whether that's the book you mean to write. Booker's framework assumes it. You don't have to.
  10. If a strand is thin, get the finer grain. Booker's categories are broad. Once you know which one you're in, Ronald B. Tobias's narrower plot types, such as pursuit, escape, rivalry or maturation, will tell you more about what that particular kind of story needs.

A copy-and-paste version for your notes:

Last page: __________ Plot the ending pays: __________ Plot the opening promises: __________ Other strands, and what each one is owed: __________ Paid / refused, and why: __________

Common mistakes and misunderstandings

"There are only seven stories, so mine has been told." The claim is about broad shapes, not stories. Thousands of novels share each shape, and the shape is the least distinctive thing about any of them. A taxonomy this broad can't use anything up.

Booker's book is not a craft manual. It has no exercises, no outlining method and no advice about scenes. It's a work of criticism with a psychological theory attached, and writers who buy it expecting a how-to book usually stop in Part Two.

Comedy does not mean jokes, and the Quest does not mean fantasy. Booker's Comedy is the plot of confusion resolved by recognition, which is why most romance belongs there. His Quest includes adventure stories, war stories and pilgrimages with no magic in them. Use his definitions, not the everyday words.

A good fit proves nothing. Because the categories are wide, almost any book can be made to fit one, and the fit feels like insight. Test the label by asking what it predicts about your ending. If it predicts nothing you didn't already know, it's decoration.

The second half is opinion, not method. Booker's verdicts on Proust, Chekhov, Joyce, Hardy and the rest are arguments about literature and modern culture. They aren't rules a novel has to obey to work, and most reviewers rejected them.

The Rule of Three is a habit, not a law. Threes are common in folk tales and useful in plotting. Booker's claim that they carry archetypal significance is one Dutton took apart, and nothing in your draft needs to come in threes to be satisfying.

Booker's seven are not Vonnegut's shapes. Kurt Vonnegut's drawn story curves and the 2016 study that found six emotional arcs in a large set of novels are about how a character's fortunes rise and fall over time, rather than about plot types. Booker's seven also aren't the old classroom list of conflict types, man against nature and the rest. The Story page has Vonnegut and the study, and Conflict covers the conflict types.

Booker did not invent the idea of counting plots. Polti counted thirty-six in 1895, and Tobias twenty in 1993. Booker's contribution was the particular seven and the theory that unites them. The Plot page has the history.

The gender scheme comes with the framework. You can use the seven as labels without taking on Booker's masculine and feminine values. You can't adopt his theory of what makes an ending complete without them.

Related elements