What if I've stolen somebody's plot?

In that case, still man vs self as the different people that walk around the tree have problems in their lives and you get to see glimpses of their struggle.

We're deviating from the topic at hand, and your eagerness to use word twisting to argue displeases me. Could we get back to the original topic?

I think that the lack of unique plots is a good thing, because you can never really steal someone's plot, but just take it and make it your own, and it's interesting to see how the same plot can be used again and again in different ways. It's one of the cool things about writing

 

TEchnically (and nubishly siad), it is man vs man, if we accept that God vs God is also man vs man.

The first god is nature. The second - Time/Death/ whatever you want to name the reason for the tree's perish. The people walking by are the audience, the latter needed so that the reader can see what's going on. Or, if you think that both Death, Time and Nature are just the many facets of one god, then it's man vs self (Even if you think it the practical way that the tree can not think -- in that case, nature vs nature - life vs death, or in other words man vs self).

Sorry to deviate from the topic name. No matter at what level, it's been done before. I recall somebody saying something about vampires in the future and voila - it's been published. And think about all those pieces of work that have never been published, yet are still novels or books or whatever (the fact that they are bad doesn't mean they aren't such). Trust me, it's been done before. Mankind has had quite some millennia to think of possible plots already. Anyway, if I've understood well, it's not about 'what', but about 'how' here (if you get what I mean).

Just my opinion of course.

 

I agree completely. I think anything that can be thought of at this point has been thought of.

 

He's not word twisting. If anything, you're the one doing that, twisting your interpretation of the word "man" to somehow make a tree fit that description.

Maybe everything has been done on the most basic level, but you can't go and say that everything has been done before when there are practically infinite different ways you could go about writing a single story. I could take a very Lord of the Rings-type story, replace all the characters with levitating talking jellyfish, and we have ourselves a new story. Sure, it's just altering the details of a story that's already been done, but that makes it different. It is, as we have been shown countless times, enough.

 

The way you wrote this example shows it as the MC being the tree. Therefore it becomes man vs. self.

Now, if it's just someone *watching* the cycle of the tree, it's man vs. nature.

 

I don't think you understood what I meant. Man, is, in the three standard plots, the main character or object being discussed. I'm not twisting anything. How else do you interepret works that don't have any "men" by standard definition? Now, by word twisting, I meant that the poster seems to know what people mean by the three basic conflicts, but is trying to be "smart" by finding odd, specific cases that don't fit in, so he must be right, so hah! I'm utterly disgusted by this kind of behavior because it proves nothing, but very well. If they want to be right, so be it.

 

Wha...? Someone watching a tree is doing battle with nature? Or is it the tree that's considered the man again? Either way, there is no conflict to be found, so it can't be classified by the three conflict types.

 

I think you're seriously overreacting. He was just trying to prove that not all stories fall under one of the three basic conflict types, particularly stories where there is no conflict at all. Such as people observing a tree.

 

Miswrite wins for figuring out how to use society as the MC of sorts and assuming conflict from there. FMK was close, however nobody gets the secret bonus point for deducing that if there is no conflict in the story -> then it can't fit into "3 standard plots" or any such categorisations -> therefore it is not actually a story as such but merely written art!

... I promise to stop deviating the thread now.

False. If you consider the book word for word, it has not been written before. If you consider the general meaning of each sentence, that combination has not been written before. Etc, until you reach a level of consideration high enough where those combination of plots / character details have been done before.

 

Haha I had no idea this question would be quite so controversial. Thanks for the input though guys! xxx