: What new plots are available to writers? I read The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker (yes, it was so heavy that I had to cut into two books just to be able to carry it around) and

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The problem I see in this and many similar questions on this and other similar sites is the attempt to approach writing from the perspective of literary scholarship.

Literary theory tries to understand the basic principles of literature. And science is obsessed with simplification, because grasping the true complexity of reality is beyond our limited minds. That does not mean that there are only five dimensions of personality or only seven plots. It just means that scholars have found this self-limitation useful for their goals.

But writers aren't scholars. It is not our aim to write a clever treatise on how few plots we can reduce the huge variety of literature to. Our aim is to write literature. And in writing, each book is unique and there are as many plots as there are stories.

Do not believe the idiocy of how-to-write books.

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I believe it's less about finding a new plot and more about finding a new, or at least interesting, take on an old one. We've been writing for so long, that every plot has been written. That doesn't matter though because there's an infinite different ways to write each plot, which means there's always room for more stories to tell.

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There's really only one plot: Somebody has a problem, and must deal with it.

If that isn't true, there isn't really a story, just some descriptions of things.

You might subdivide that into [happy, mixed, sad] endings. You might subdivide by the problem, [political, romantic, business, science, ...]. You might subdivide by the protagonist, or antagonist: Heck the antagonist can be "space" as in "Gravity", or a hurricane or flood or meteor or forest fire. e.g. "The Perfect Storm" has a nature-antagonist. The antagonist can be oneself, i.e. emotional, a man fighting addiction for example: Nobody is striving to prevent him, they don't care, only he cares and he can't effing BREAK IT.

All the "X plots" you see are categorizing stories by types of problems you see, and their similarities in how successful books/films/plays focused on that kind of problem structured the story. Those structures can be surprisingly common: In a love story, a simple progression from meeting to happy marriage just doesn't sell. It is boring if the MC solves their problem too easily.

More generally you can have a story about somebody dealing with a problem, but if it lacks conflict, it doesn't sell, because it is boring. There must be resistance to be a story people want to read.

Ignore all the plots, just pick your problem, and try to put conflict on every page, be it small or large, with another person or with the environment or within the character. Don't make it easy. Keep it plausible. Keep an ending in mind at all times (even if in the course of writing you decide to change it). Chances are if you write a good story, it will (from 10,000 feet, as they say) bear some similarity to other stories. Don't worry about it, your problem is unique because (unless you plagiarize) your characters are new and the specifics of what happens to them are new, because you have an imagination that can write about something other than what you have already read/seen.

Just write a story, let other people categorize it.

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You've heard it said that there are only 7 basic types of plot. I say to you there are only 4 types of plots. I mean there are actually only 3 types of plots. I mean there are 9 because Booker missed 2. Did I say there was only 9? Wait, I want to go back to my first answer, there are 4 types, but with different names than in the first link.

As you can see, there are many people who have claimed to found the "x types of stories/plots". Instead of thinking of these as formulas that must be followed, take the advice of Mary Robinette Kowal. She implores us to think of all these different list types as diagnostic tools. If you're trying to be creative without being constricted, just write your story. Then, if you run into problems with keeping the reader engaged, grab one of these lists and try to map your story to one of the listed categories. See what you might be missing.

If you're trying to be truly new and creative, try to understand why the missing element is needed for your story. Then, once you know why that element is needed, try to substitute that element with something different.

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The only reason we say there are a small number of plots one can list is because they're defined in an extremely vague way. There's still plenty of room for originality; I'll let you decide whether it constitutes "hope". Here's the best analogy I've heard:

The basic plot is like a mannequin. You're pretty limited in the
number of shapes you can come up with -- curvy or straight, thin or
fat. The rest of the movie -- the subplots, the personalities, the
atmosphere, the pace, the number of explosions you add -- that's like
the costume you put on the mannequin. Someone pointing out that a plot
is "basically the same" is pointing out that two designers are using
the same fat mannequin. One could be wearing a bloodied Viking costume
and one could be wearing a flowery muumuu, but they're both size 40,
so they're "basically the same."

So what are the details of this costume? TV Tropes lists tens of thousands of tropes, as well as many ways to use them. When you crunch the numbers, stories can be as unique as human genomes.

The real danger isn't unoriginality; it's trying to be original with the most obvious deviation possible from the mainstream, because every budding writer is trying that. That's as liable to make your work like others' as any follow-the-leader mentality.

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There haven't been any "new" plots in centuries. That's because people have always had the same problems, and a plot is a problem, more or less.

Science fiction has explored the plots we already know, centuries into the future, and found that if your story is going to be readable by people now, it can't include too much that doesn't exist yet -- especially in terms of the way people feel, what they need, and what problems they have. It's possible that in a century or two there may be new plots, but there certainly aren't any new ones since that book was written.

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