Gary Dalkin
How many stories are there? According to Christopher Booker’s monumental volume on the nature of story, Seven Basic Plots… well, he sort of gives it away in the title. Booker argues that there are, essentially, only seven archetypal stories (for example, Rags to Riches, or, Voyage and Return), and that writers rework them through endless variations. As Robert McKee writes in Story – Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting: ‘The archetypal story unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific pattern.’