If you ask the internet, it will tell you that there are seven types of plots—that’s it, seven! So how is it that so many tens of millions of stories manage to exist? The key is variation—of style, of setting, of tone and temperament, of structure. But even more than that, I think it’s the characters who inhabit those stories that make them so different. Pick any situation, any stock “plot,” and put different people in it—suddenly you have a different story.
But if all the plots in all the world can be boiled down to seven general categories, who’s to say that the same can’t be done for character types? While a quick Google search doesn’t turn up as decisive a number as the search for plot types did, it does bring up a myriad number of blogs and articles, each one offering its own character type breakdown. I’m willing to bet that those writers have narrowed the field down to less than tens of millions. So once again, how can so many different stories exist?
Looking at the landscape of all stories through all of time is a somewhat daunting task. Luckily, there’s a much smaller pool we can examine:
Crime procedurals.
Turn on your television to any major network after eight o’clock on a weeknight, and you will see a team trying to solve some sort of murder. Some teams look at the bones of the victim, while others analyze the minute details left at the scene of the crime. Different shows focus on different types of killers, from stalkers to serial killers to sex offenders. Peel away those surface differentiators though, and you end up with roughly the same formula: Inciting crime --> Series of clues --> Guilty looking suspects who turn out to be innocent --> Discovery of guilty criminal!
You’d think that only a handful of these shows could survive at once, but there are well over a dozen. It all comes down, at least as far as I’m concerned, to character. Who do you want to hang out with for an hour each week? Beyond the dramatic back-stories and formative moments that brought each character to the force/morgue/psychic parlor, whose personality do you like? Are you a fan of the nerdier detectives on Castle? Or perhaps the quirky team over at Bones? Would you prefer, instead, the more serious denizens of CSI or Law & Order: S.V.U.?
Leaving the realm of fiction and looking at real life, there are an infinite number of things that make each person different. 1,000 people with the same goals and ambitions will have different quirks, different interests, different sayings and mannerisms that make them unique. It’s the reason that your friends are your friends, and you can’t just sub them out with someone who works the same job or grew up in the same town.
Returning once again to fiction, my theory is that trying to come up with a completely new story, while an important goal to strive for, is ultimately impossible. The big reveals have all been done: The bad guy is his father! The butler did it! There was a TWIN! There was a TRIPLET!
I’ve read stories where the author is fascinated with their own plot, and simply creates cardboard characters to walk through this amazing world they’ve birthed into life. Ultimately, those stories always lose me, no matter how intricate and expertly crafted their rules and histories, or how many twists and turns the writer takes me through along the way. But give me two fleshed out characters, two interesting people I haven’t met before, and I’ll happily read pages and pages of them sitting on a couch together talking. When it’s all read and done, character is what makes me care about a story.
If all you’ve got is an interesting plot, I’ll just read the Wikipedia article.