Beyond 'narrative exhaustion'

In The Guardian, screenwriter Paul Schrader looks at how writers can adapt to a world in which people are subject to an ever increasing number of fictional and reality TV narratives.

Writers have always known there are a limited number of storylines. Christopher Booker's Seven Basic Plots popularised the number seven, but others have argued for three, 20 and 36 basic plots - Rudyard Kipling said 69. That's not new. We do tell variations of the same stories over and over. That's not what I mean by the "exhaustion of narrative". What is new is the omnipresence and ubiquity of plot created by media proliferation. We are inundated by narrative. We are swimming in storylines.