John Baker’s Blog

At The Robblog, Robb has a question: How do you know when to listen to feedback and change your story?
Does a story’s power and resonance come from the author, as if in a vacuum? Or does it come from the relationship between the story and the reader? And if a writer works in an area [...]

According to Christopher Booker’s 2004 book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, there are seven of them:
1. Tragedy. This usually involves a hero with a fatal flaw meeting a tragic end. Macbeth or Madame Bovary are obvious candidates. Others might be The Picture of Dorian Gray, Julius Caesar and Anna Karenina. [...]

A taster:
One minute before the end of the world, everyone gathers on the grounds of the Kunstmuseum. Men, women, and children for a giant circle and hold hands. No one moves. No one speaks. It is so absolutely quiet that each person can hear the heart-beat of the person to his right or his left. [...]

At Prospect, Richard Jenkyns discusses what he calls canon anxiety. In a lengthy but never less than interesting essay, Do We Need A Literary Canon? he argues that our sense of belonging, our shared references, must evolve more organically.
Consider the most striking literary canonisation of our times. Jane Austen has always been esteemed, and [...]