I once read a quotation along the lines that there are only seven basic story lines, and that all the stories in the world can be seen as permutations of those seven. Do you know: (a) Who said/wrote it? (b) What the exact quotation is (including the descriptions of the basic story lines)?
Thirty-six. Attributed to Carlo Gozzi and reprised by Georges Polti in The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (1917). Polti comes across as somewhat daft, stating that there are precisely 36 emotions, which in some unclear manner are tied to the 36 situations. Nonetheless, many of his story lines unquestionably are timeless locomotives of plot, for example, Situation III, Crime Pursued by Vengeance–Charles Bronson’s career in a nutshell. Or Situation XV, Murderous Adultery, which pretty much sums up Fatal Attraction. Others have a decidedly musty air, such as Situation XXXI, Conflict With a God, or XX, Self-Sacrificing for an Ideal. Not in this day and age, unless your ideal is Getting Vested in the Pension Plan.
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One. One school of thought holds that all stories can be summed up as Exposition/Rising Action/Climax/Falling Action/Denouement, or to simplify it even further, Stuff Happens, although even at this level of generality we seem to have left out Proust.
