The Plagiarism Plot Is Having a Moment. Copy That.
The counting and classifying of story lines is a venerable literary pastime, one that has occasionally proved so strenuous and competitive that it could pass among book people for sport. For good reason. Any tally of possible plots risks bumping up against what for fiction writers is the cornerstone of the profession: the claim to originality. Long a sensitive issue, it has become only more fraught with the advent of A.I. and the proliferation of chatbots able to generate “new” stories derived entirely from troves of old ones, all without the aid of an author.
Aristotle made the first stab at a plot count around 330 B.C., when he declared that there were just two kinds of stories: simple (featuring a change in fortune) and complex (in which the change in fortune is accompanied by setbacks and reversals — for Aristotle, the perfect tragedy).
Two millenniums later, the count had swelled. In 1892, Rudyard Kipling suggested that the number of plots was actually 69, a high-water mark for sure, but then Kipling had witnessed the novel’s spectacular efflorescence over the course of the preceding century. Still, he floated the claim in a few lines of Victorian doggerel, so it’s possible he intended it partly in jest.
