There’s Already a Movie Out About That…
Once as I was working on a screenplay, I described it to an online friend. The reaction was something like this: “You might consider working on something else. The YOU GIVE IT A TITLE movie that was just released sounds exactly like that.”
What was my reaction to that comment? Nothing. Well, maybe I said something like, “Oh really, that’s interesting…” Other than that, I totally ignored the comment.
Give fifty writers a writing assignment… the same topic, even the same genre, and you are going to get fifty very different stories. Characters are going to be different. So are motivations, plot points, and just about everything else you can think of.
When someone wrote a screenplay titled “Halloween” do you think that was the end of Halloween type movies? Nope! There were many more, all with numbers after their title! Same with Godfather movies.
Oh okay, we can argue that some of these were sequels .
But has there only been one movie made about WWII or the Holocaust? No! Has there only been one romantic comedy? No! Has there only been one movie about getting addicted to drugs? Or one movie about someone being kidnapped? Or one movie about babysitters being terrorized? No! No! No!
There are only so many plots out there. How many?
Well, if you had asked Aristotle that question, he would have answered: two. Rudyard Kipling thought there were sixty-nine different plots. A guy named Carlo Gozzi felt there were thirty-six.
It doesn’t matter “how many” there are. What matters is what each individual writer does with it. Now, that’s a completely different thing!
November 13, 2009 at 5:41 AM
Christopher Booker argues that there are only seven basic story plots and I agree that there are only so many different ‘types’ of stories. What makes each one unique is how they are told and how different elements of plot and character and setting are woven together. I think many writers run into trouble when they start either thinking they have come up with something entirely new (there may be a reason it has never been done before/or it has already been done and you just haven’t encountered it) or they think they need to do something entirely different. The bottom line is you need to tell a good story and you need to make sure it is told your way. That is what will make it stand apart from all the other books out there that have probably done something very similar before.
Thanks for an excellent post and giving us all something interesting to think about.
November 13, 2009 at 6:12 AM
“The bottom line is you need to tell a good story and you need to make sure it is told your way.”
Amen! Thanks for visiting.