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The Seven Basic Plots
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The Seven Basic Plots (edit title/settings)

Why We Tell Stories

by Christopher Booker (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular... read more

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  • “Without in any way wishing to detract from the genius of our great storytellers, if there is one thing we have seen emerging from the past few hundred pages it is the extent to which the stories told by even the greatest of them are not their own.”
    Christopher Booker
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • This event or summons provides the `Call' which will lead the hero or heroine out of their initial state into a series of adventures or experiences which, to a greater or lesser extent, will transform their lives.
    Highlighted by 17 Kindle customers
  • The plot of a story is that which leads its hero or heroine either to a 'catastrophe' or an `unknotting'; either to frustration or to liberation; either to death or to a renewal of life.
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • One may sum up by saying that, physically, morally and psychologically, the monster in storytelling thus represents everything in human nature which is somehow twisted and less than perfect. Above all, and it is the supreme characteristic of every monster who has ever been portrayed in a story, he or she is egocentric.
    Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers
  • five identifiable stages: from the initial mood of anticipation, through a `dream stage' when all seems to be going unbelievably well, to the `frustration stage' when things begin to go mysteriously wrong, to the `nightmare stage' where everything goes horrendously wrong, ending in that final moment of death and destruction.
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • The next thing of which we can be sure is that the action which the hero or heroine are being drawn into will involve conflict and uncertainty, because without some measure of both there cannot be a story.
    Highlighted by 11 Kindle customers
  • Seeing the world through tunnel vision, shaped by its egocentric desires, there is always something which the monster cannot see and is likely to overlook. That is why, by the true hero, the monster can always in the end be outwitted:
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
  • The hero is always shown as acting selflessly and in some higher cause, in a way which shows him standing at the opposite pole to the monster's egocentricity.
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
  • In other words, the inmost rhythm of our experience of the story is of an initial sense of constriction, followed by a phase of relative enlargement, followed by a more serious constriction. Then the story works up to its climax, when the threatening pressure on the hero is at its greatest. This is released in a final, much deeper act of liberation, coupled with the sense that something of inestimable and lasting value has been won from the darkness.
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
  • wherever men and women have told stories, all over the world, the stories emerging to their imaginations have tended to take shape in remarkably similar ways.
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
  • John Vyvyan, whose little book The Shakespearean Ethic was not only an attempt to extend this kind of analysis to some of Shakespeare's plays, but is also the most original book about Shakespeare I have ever read.
    Highlighted by 6 Kindle customers
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First Sentence edit see section history

Imagine we are about to be plunged into a story-any story in the world.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Christopher Booker (Author)

Classification edit see section history

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