Basic Plots: Tragedy

Check out this helpful post from the Story Empire blog on basic plots. This post focuses on Tragedy.

Story Empire

Ciao, SEers. On March 21, I started a series of posts on the seven basic plot types, as defined by Christopher Booker. So far, we’ve covered Rebirth. Today, we’re going to talk about Tragedy.

In its simplest form, tragedy is a bad choice resulting in a bad ending for the protagonist.

Within the course of a story, many characters will make many bad choices, some of which might result in a bad end. That’s tragic, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a tragedy. A “tragedy” is an unfavorable ending for the main character, something they can’t recover from and makes the reader feel bad for the hero. A tragedy is not a bad ending for the antagonist or even a bad ending for the hero who died for a noble cause. It’s got to be a sad, non-redemptive ending for the hero.

Here’s a list of some of…

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