In 2016 The universities of Vermont and Adelaide took on the ambitious project of analyzing the emotional arcs of 1,737 works of fiction to determine how many narrative plots they contained. The astonishing answer? SIX! Does this mean we all write clichés?
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To start this discussion, here are the six that the study boiled these novels down to:
Rags to Riches - A steady rise from bad to good fortune.
Riches to Rags - A fall from good to bad fortune, often a tragedy.
Man-in-a-hole - A fall followed by a rise..
Icarus – follows a character’s rise and then his untimely fall (for Icarus, this was due to his failure to heed warnings about flying too 
close to the sun with his wings of wax.)
Cinderella – similar to Icarus, but rather than ending with the fall, the character makes a come-back.
Oedipus – A character who starts well but lands in trouble, climbs out of this pit, but his rise is short lived and he descends again to his doom.
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We can also visit Wikipedia that outlines 7 basic plots: (You’ll see the similarities to the above list) and they even offer examples.
Overcoming the Monster - The protagonist sets out to defeat an antagonistic force (often evil) that threatens the protagonist and/or protagonist's homeland. Examples: James Bond (Ian Fleming), Jaws, Star Wars: A New Hope, Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling)
The Quest - The protagonist and companions set out to acquire an important object or to get to a location. They face temptations and other obstacles along the way. Examples: The Iliad (Homer), The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien), Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Comedy -Light and humorous character with a happy or cheerful ending; a dramatic work in which the central motif is the triumph over adverse circumstance, resulting in a successful or happy conclusion. Comedy is more than humor. It refers to a pattern where the conflict becomes more and more confusing but is at last made plain in a single clarifying event. Examples: Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare), Bridget Jones's Diary (Helen Fielding), Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Big Lebowski.
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I find it interesting that all those millions of books, movies and stories out there can be so neatly boiled down to these basics and yet 
encompass so much variety. And what makes them all unique? The endless permutations of the conflicts involved and the plethora of characters caught up in those conflicts. Conflict is the STRUGGLE! This struggle can be between characters, between your specific character and the society in which he lives, your character and the forces of nature, and in today’s world, your character and technology, and lastly, internally between your character and him or herself.
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Years ago, I added the book Goal, Motivation & Conflict, by Debra Dixon to my shelf and it has been my mantra ever since. To paraphrase GMC: WHAT does your character want - the Goal, WHY does he or she want it – Motivation, and WHAT stands in the way? That last question is the conflict that drives the story. What is your character willing to do or sacrifice to get what they want? Some things to consider when you start throwing obstacles into your character’s path are their relationships to others, their sense of duty and responsibility, how they cope with failure, and what moral temptations or dilemmas arise? One absolute requirement for good conflict is the stakes. WHAT will be the cost?
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As my personal illustration, I decided to see how many different aspects a single event might have depending on the character and what they have to lose or gain. I opted to consider a fire that destroys the local corner store in a city neighborhood and how it might cause conflict and end with very different results. Here’s what I came up with:
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What if the owner of the building has been trying to buy the store operator out of her ten-year contract so he can level the building and put up something more lucrative? (A power grab or a desire for more money.) Maybe your character is the store owner and it’s been in the family for three generations. 
(There’s history here.) Or it’s a relatively new enterprise, but it’s your sole mode of providing for your family? (Another, though smaller, desire or need for money.) Perhaps your character has been working in this store their entire adult life and is too old to seek a new career. It’s possible your character was homeless and camped there when the fire broke out and is now seriously injured. Or maybe the store owner’s teenage son was making out with his girlfriend and both perished in the fire. Perhaps your character is the woman who operates a similar store across the street – how will she benefit from this? Or did she start the fire to reduce her competition to ashes? What if your character felt wronged by something totally outside the store, but torched it for revenge?
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So, you can see how a single event might impact each character in entirely different ways. I’m sure you can come up with a few more scenarios to this fire in a small store on the corner in a busy neighborhood so you can begin to appreciate how more than 1,700 different novels were boiled down to only 6 major plot lines, or where Wikipedia’s list comes from.
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I could give you a list of plot devices or the cliches often used, but instead I’m just going to leave you with these links to a list of 50 of each that included all the ones I could think of and more.
PLOT DEVICES: https://nofilmschool.com/list-of-plot-devices
THE CLICHES: https://nofilmschool.com/storytelling-cliches
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My first published novel featured a man who had fought in Vietnam during the era when I came of age. It was partly inspired by my brother’s time there and things he shared with me over the years, but more than partly because I did the brainstorming and asked myself dozens of questions similar to the query about the fire above. For my protagonist/hero, the experience in his relative youth had left its mark on him, just as it had the thousands of young men and a significant number of women who were sent into the cauldron of that poorly understood war. My own brother and others I sat down to speak with were generous with their memories of the conflict, the place, the people, their fellow soldiers and, unlike today’s soldiers, the welcome they did not get when they survived and came home. Their individual reactions to all of the above were a lot alike in many ways, yet very different in others, so I was able to create a character using a piece of this and a bit from that, and color his reactions and his current viewpoint by those reflected experiences. When my story starts Matt Steele has been tagged to run for president of the US on his party’s ticket. Ultimately my Steele’s arc is most closely aligned with the rebirth option noted above, but given that I am a pantser, this was never set in stone while I was writing. I created the character, threw him into the fire and went along for the ride while the story unfolded. But that story was informed by conflict that had been experienced and shared with me, by the men who went to war and came home to build their lives around the wounds, the triumphs and the losses.
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In my Tide’s Way series, I worked closer to home - well, not home specifically since I’ve never lived in coastal North Carolina, but in the day to day give and take of family life, love, children, work and community – falling generally into either the quest or Cinderella categories. A bigger challenge for me was when I dove into my police procedural series since I have never worked in law enforcement, nor had any family members who do, but the generosity of the deputies I rode with and the Citizens Law Enforcement Academy provided me with an amazing amount of inspiration and ideas and those stories would, I think be categorized as the Quest. My only historical to date was inspired by a sailing trip I took to investigate a deserted island off the coast of Maine. When it occurred to me to wonder what if I’d actually fallen into the old cellar hole and woke up in another century, I began to ask myself those dozens of questions and toss around all kinds of possibilities. That story falls neatly 
into the voyage and return category. In my new series, I’m incorporating some of the typical tropes (plot devices,) but tying two stories together with the same or similar conflict yet separated by time: one current and one historic, but both in the same setting and place. Obviously, I hope this new twist will be as much fun for my readers as it was for me to write and all the intertwined stories are easily defined as Cinderella or rebirth stories.
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As surprised as I was to read that there are only 6 or 7 major plot themes, it turned out that all my stories do fit somewhere on this short list. I bet yours do as well.
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For all of us, creating compelling conflict includes one other very important ingredient – creating characters the reader can care about or hate – with passion. Next month, we’ll discuss how to create those compelling characters to go with our convincing plots.
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Today, I leave you with this: there’s a joke that’s made the rounds on social media that goes like this: What has 27 actors, three settings, two writers and one plot? The answer? 671 Hallmark movies. In all fairness, there have to be a zillion viewers who keep tuning in or Hallmark would change things up, but their formula works for them and all those zillion viewers and even this formula fits easily into the comedy category outlined by Wikipedia. Unfortunately, you and I and all the other struggling authors today have tough competition and we need to up our game to have our novels find even a small share of the market. We need to take one of those six or seven main conflicts and find unique ways to present them. Updated ways to tell the story and interesting ways to resolve them so our readers will keep coming back for more.
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Hop on over to my fellow Blog Hoppers and check out their wisdom for creating compelling conflict without resorting to clichés.
Bob Rich
Belinda Edwards
Helena Fairfax
Connie Vines
Sally Odgers
AJ Maguire
