ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Christopher Booker

Okay, so Christopher Booker is a man who wrote a lot of books about stories. You know how you like to read books and hear stories? Well, he did too, but he also studied them very carefully to see what made them good or bad.

He looked at all different kinds of stories, like books, movies, and plays. He noticed that a lot of them were similar in certain ways, and he called these similarities "archetypes."

An archetype is like a pattern that keeps showing up in stories. For example, have you ever noticed how a lot of fairy tales have a hero who needs to rescue someone or something? That's an archetype.

Christopher Booker looked at these archetypes and how they related to the structure of a story. The structure of a story is the way it's put together, like the beginning, middle, and end. He believed that there were only seven basic plots that all stories followed.

These seven basic plots are:

1. Overcoming the monster
2. Rags to riches
3. The quest
4. Voyage and return
5. Comedy
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth

So, Christopher Booker was a guy who looked at stories very carefully and figured out what made them work. He believed that all stories follow a certain pattern and that there are only seven basic plots that you can use to tell a good story.