Christopher Booker offers marvelous insights into storytelling in 
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories

Although Booker’s book about books offers a lot more than a simple list
of the 7 essential plots, I’ll give you a glimpse of them to quench your thirst:

1. Overcoming the monster
    (David and Goliath)

2. Rags to riches
    (Cinderella)

3. The Quest: traveller, fighting evil
    (Odysseus)

4. Voyage and return: hero returns from abroad, renewed
    (Robinson Crusoe)

5. Comedy: confusion reigns, happy ending
    (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

6. Tragedy: human overreaching, terrible consequences
    (Oedipus)

7. Rebirth
    (Scrooge)

“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”
– Gabriel García Márquez,
   Love in the Time of Cholera