For as long as there’s been literary analysis, there has been an effort to determine just how many variations on plot there are, and to codify them accordingly.
Your high-school English teacher no doubt taught you that all conflict can be boiled down to four types: “man versus man,” “man versus society,” “man versus nature,” “man versus himself.” Remember that one?
French writer Georges Polti asserted there are Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (1916); more recently, English author Christopher Booker argued for Seven Basic Plots (2004).
For my money, none of them quite “cracked the code” until screenwriter Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! identified ten types, or “genres,” and delineated the specific criteria (three apiece) that distinguish one from another—and they’re not what you’d think. Rather than vague categorizations like “horror,” “comedy,” and “action,” Snyder classified his genres like so:
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