Stories have plots or storylines, by which the stories are told.
One of the ideas in storytelling is that there are a limited number of plots. Here are some of them (or maybe all -- who knows?), with commentaries on many elements:
Different plots
- Booker's Seven Basic Plots: A modern perspective.
- Friedman's Story Plots: 14 plots (and discussion of each).
- Georges Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations: Common plot elements.
- Reich's American Narratives: Four real themes.
- Tobias' 20 Plots: From his popular book.
- Parker's Story Types: Ten types of story.
- Classic Story Conflicts: Tension conflicts that appear in many stories.
- Classic Story Types: Many common types of story.
The story structure
Here are expositions of the classic heroic storyline, which many similarities, plus more general structures.
- The Five-Stage Story Structure: Common to many stories.
- Three Stage Story: Three stages that appear in more than stories.
- A Classic Story Structure: A simplified epic structure.
- Heroic structures:
- Campbell's 'Hero's Journey': A classic decomposition of the epic tale.
- Vogler's Story Structure: A simplification of Campbell's structure.
- Propp's 31 Narratemes: From his 'Morphology of the Folk Tale'.
- The Eight Point Story Arc: May and Watts' variant.
Source: changingminds.org