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That list of 36 dramatic situations got me thinking about how few of us actually use it
I was digging through some old writing books last week and hit a list from 1919 by a French writer named Georges Polti. He claimed there are only 36 dramatic situations in all of storytelling, things like "Daring Enterprise" or "Mistaken Jealousy." I pulled up five of my own prompt drafts from January and every single one fit into maybe four of those boxes. What got me was how much freedom that actually gives you instead of boxing you in. If there are only 36 real plots, the prompt itself has to carry the weight with voice and detail, not a wild new premise. So now I have been writing prompts that mash two of the 36 together just to see what breaks. Has anyone else used Polti's list or a similar framework when building out prompts?
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gavin8012d ago
My buddy ran a little writers group last year and made everyone map their short stories onto Polti's list as a joke, and then the joke stopped being funny when half the room found out they'd been writing "Vengeance" over and over with different names. The wild part was the other half had honestly been mixing stuff like "Rivalry" with "Madness" without knowing it, and those were the pieces that got the best feedback. He said the mashup thing basically forces you to make the prompt itself do the heavy lifting, same as you're saying, because you can't lean on the plot being fresh. After that they started a rule where every new prompt had to borrow from two boxes minimum and nobody could reuse a combo until everyone cycled through. It got messy fast but the stories got way better.
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