I learned about the seven story archetypes in school at some point, I don’t remember when exactly. They never really mentioned where they came from, or who came up with them though. Just another exercise in wrote memorization and pattern recognition. After looking a little deeper, this is actually a very recent idea, and I’m not sure how it made it all the way into my classes so quickly. Maybe my teacher at the time just really liked the idea or something. These seven archetypes I learned about were from a book called ‘The Seven Basic Plots’ by Christopher Booker (heh, get it? he likes books and … never mind). The basic plot archetypes he recognizes are as follows:

The Quest, wherein a hero and their companions try to achieve some goal that has been set upon them, or that they have chosen for themselves. There’s usually an object they need to get, or a place they have to arrive at. Think, ‘The Lord of the Rings.’

Overcoming the Monster, which involves slaying something, either literally or metaphorically. ‘Beowulf’ fits into this nicely, but so does something like ‘The Fighter,’ a story about overcoming addiction.

Voyage and Return, represented always by Homer’s classic ‘Odyssey.’

Comedy, a story involving a humorous triumph and a lighter mood like ‘Zoolander.’

Tragedy, a story where the hero has some major flaw that is eventually their undoing, as in ‘Hamlet.’

Rags to Riches, where a character acquires something grand, loses it, then regains it and learns something along the way. I can’t think of an example for this one honestly. Maybe that one poker movie with Matt Damon? ‘Rounders?’

And finally, Rebirth, where a character is forced to grow into someone new. Think ‘Beauty and the Beast.’

I’m not sure why these seven are where it ends to be perfectly honest. What about a heist story for example? Heists come with their own tropes, character developments, and plot structure, so why don’t heists get a spot? Well you might say, heists are just a subdivision of the quest archetype, because they have to go retrieve an object and face difficulties along the way. Well ok then, but if that’s the case, maybe we should remove rags to riches entirely, seeing as it’s just a subdivision of rebirth. The whole point of rags to riches is that the character is forced to learn something about themselves and change into a new person as a result right? And what about a story that combines archetypes? ‘Ender’s Game’ for example is about slaying a monster in space, but it’s also about Ender’s rebirth as a person, and it also touches on how Ender’s greatest strength of winning fights unequivocally is also his greatest flaw. Is it an ‘overcoming the monster,’ or a ‘rebirth,’ or a ‘tragedy?’ I think the answer is probably just ‘yes.’ So then, what’s the point of distinguishing if a story can be almost half of the plot types all at once?

Let’s take a step back. Joseph Campbell’s famous book ‘The Hero With a Thousand Faces’ was written much earlier in 1949. He lays out one giant plot archetype, aptly named the monomyth. These books don’t exactly line up, but they aren’t exclusive to one another either. Every one of Booker’s basic plot archetypes could include the elements of the monomyth that Campbell laid out (yes, all 17 of them. I refuse to go over them individually, ok?). Campbell might even say that further distinguishing the monomyth into smaller and smaller subdivisions is pointless, and I would tend to agree, for the very reason that it gets hard to tell the difference between them at some point. At least I would, if I actually believed the monomyth was universal to begin with …

There’s something at the bottom of all this I’ve never really been able to wrap my head around. Why are we bucketing stories into different archetypes in the first place? From a writer’s perspective, it’s nice to have a framework, but these authors almost never cast their projections about what a plot is onto their own works exclusively. They never say ‘oh this is just how I do it, all of my plots follow these 17 distinct steps.’ It’s always, ‘everyone’s plot follows these archetypes, whether they know it or not.’ Regardless of any evidence to the contrary of course. Distinguishing genre I can understand, since marketing is a huge part of selling books. But why distinguish plot types from a reader’s perspective at all? It would seem to be counter to what a reader wants to do, which is immerse themselves and enjoy a story. If you’re constantly on the lookout for these elements (or even worse, constantly looking out for missing elements) you will always be aware that you’re just reading a story, judging it on a preconceived notion of what it should be rather than what it is. For me personally, that kinda defeats the point.

In the creative writing course I took in college, there was one young woman in the class who really blew me away. She only read one story before the class, but it was really killer stuff. It was a story about hunting with her father, learning a lesson about life and death. It was only about a page, and yet, I still loved that story. It was a complete tale, and it had a great emotional impact. And the thing is, I can’t pick an archetype for it to fall under at all. It has none of the elements of any of them except maybe rebirth. But the character in the story didn’t become someone wholly new, or change drastically. It was just one lesson, albeit an important one. Neither did it have any of the (17, count em, 17) elements that Campbell recognized in his book. I guess what I’m trying to say is, a beginner doesn’t consider all the stuff I wrote about in this post. A beginner just writes a story that feels like it should be told, and that is that. It’s only advanced writers that end up casting frameworks onto things, making sure that they have each little tiny piece that they believe must be in a story for it to be complete, and then they take it even farther and say ‘all stories are as I see them.’

Personally I think these archetypes are only useful if you want to use them. A plot structure can make a story much easier to write, but it isn’t strictly necessary in my opinion, and it’s often limiting. Maybe there’s a way to tell a tragedy without a critical flaw, or a way to write a comedy where the hero never triumphs. Maybe there’s a way to tell a kind of story nobody ever thought of, but only if you give up some of those 17 elements and add some of your own. Just food for thought.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley