Stumbled on this website.
So, when is something deemed original? It seems that, given enough generalization, everything can be made to look like a very small set of original ideas. Someone (Garly, I think) once told me that he learned in writing class that all stories fall into 7 (or thereabouts) basic plots. One example is "fish out of water" (think Crocodile Dundee, or better yet, don't).
A brief survey of the web shows many sites devoted to the basic plot list, all with varying counts (See here and here)
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Posted by John DeNardo at Thursday September 04, 2003 at 12:12 AM
© 2008 SF Signal
Didn't Polti write a text about how pretty much all plots of anything fall into 36 categories? The only problem is he keeps repeating himself in it so it turns out to be about 27 or so...
Posted by Desi on Monday October 06, 2003 at 5:22 AM at 5:22 AM
I've seen it commented before that there are really only 4 basic plots which keep getting re-used. I'm too lazy to actually Google for info on this, but I know what you're talking about....
Posted by JP on Thursday October 09, 2003 at 2:05 PM at 2:05 PM