The Seven Basic Plots

Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots is a long book: despite being far larger than a paperback, it's on the order of War And Peace for thickness. It also gets a bit repetitive at times. But if you can slog through the material, you're rewarded with a good understanding of the title, that is, The Seven Basic Plots. You can also get a good dose of Jungian psychology to boot (Booker likes to talk about the symbolism of the masculine and feminine aspects of a character).

Here are his plots:
1. Overcoming the Monster

The first known story, The Epic Of Gilgamesh, is set in this form. So is the first James Bond movie, and of course a wealth of stories in between.

A hero learns of a great evil overshadowing the land (sometimes not his own land). He gets special equipment and/or weapons, heads out, and defeats the evil, freeing the land.

2. Rags To Riches

The basic tale behind such gems as Aladdin and Cinderella (that one's technically riches to rags to royalty and riches), this shows the character arc, from an impoverished beginning to a complete, Happily Ever After end. At the end the character should have status, riches, and a mate, and often a kingdom as well.

Key to this basic plot is the false ending, in which the hero appears to have gained his heart's desire - but it is too early, and he is too immature, so he loses it all, usually through some fault of his own (though not necessarily matched to the enormity of the loss). This loss is the most devastating blow to the hero, prior to the story's climax. In Aladdin it's the moment when the evil wizard uses the genie to steal the princess (note that the genie was lost because Aladdin failed to either keep it with him or inform his wife of the importance of the lamp).

In another example (David Copperfield by Charles Dickens), the false ending is marriage to an immature wife, who soon dies - so the hero may actually lose the thing he wanted completely, only to get a better thing (a mature wife) by the end.

3. The Quest

Show me a list of basic plots that doesn't have The Quest on it. Here it's the search for an object, a location or some information that requires our Hero to leave their (usually) everyday life to find. It's the basic plot most likely to include a party instead of a lone hero. Booker allows for four basic party types:

4. Voyage and Return

This is the backbone for Alice in Wonderland and The Labyrinth: The hero heads out into a realm in which the normal laws don't work and common sense isn't going to do him much good. It's the realm where intuition rules, rather than logic, and he's going to have to rely on the advice of allies or his own heart in order to pass the tests. But it stays pretty light, amusing, whimsical, until suddenly things take a dark turn. The hero finally overcomes the threat, and returns home mature but physically unchanged.

Generally speaking (according to Booker), at the end of the story, a hero who has failed to join himself to a suitable cross-gendered mate is symbolically immature or unfinished. However, in Voyage and Return, the presence of a mate is actually a problem, since the hero can take nothing back with him but experience - hence he must leave his mate behind. Some stories attempt to avoid this problem by providing a parallel version of the hero's love when he returns home; see The One and The Forbidden Kingdom for two film examples.

5. Comedy

Comedy, for Booker, is the grand mesh of relationships among a large cast, rooted in miscommunication. The fog of misunderstanding is maintained by some dark figure, often the hero's parent but sometimes the hero himself; the focus of the dark energy is in keeping the hero apart from his other half.

Unlike the other stories, the villain here is almost never just defeated; he is often redeemed, brought to a point where he admits wrongdoing and joyfully joins the party of the other characters released from the fog. The misunderstandings get cleared up, the relationships get properly aligned (eliminating any Love Dodecahedron problems), and everything gets brought to light.

Basically, if there's three or more relationships being prevented mostly by misunderstanding or lack of acceptance, you're looking at Booker's definition of a Comedy, even if the tone is rather dark. Shakespeare of course had several; George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man is another good example.

6. Tragedy

Tragedy is the flip side of Overcoming the Monster: It's the tale of the villain spiraling down into evil and then being defeated by the hero. Here, release comes only with the death or destruction of the main character. The end, however tragic, is seen as just, even if we can sympathize with the villain and see some of his choices as right or forced.

Booker's prime example for Tragedy is King Lear, in which the Tragic Hero realizes his fault at the end and repents - too late to be saved.

7. Rebirth

Rebirth is the more optimistic form of Tragedy, in which the villain spirals down into evil and then at the last second raises his head and gets pulled out of the mire by some redeeming figure, either his other half or a young child. The redeemer awakens the hero's ability to love (or feel compassion) and helps him also to see things as they are, including, sometimes, a reordering of priorities. Silas Marner is Booker's main example, in which a little girl helps the miser to stop caring so much about his lost gold.
Of course, when you begin combining elements from the seven basic plots, you end up with a more complex tale, like, for example, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which combines six (Tragedy for Saruman; Comedy the one absent).

from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSevenBasicPlots