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Who really said it

There are only two plots in all of literature: (1) A person goes on a journey, (2) A stranger comes to town

Not Tolstoy — traced to John Gardner John Gardner 1933–1982 · American novelist and teacher of fiction writing
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Tolstoy never wrote this. Quote Investigator traces the saying to the American novelist and writing teacher John Gardner: his posthumous 1984 handbook The Art of Fiction sets a student exercise using “either a trip or the arrival of a stranger,” and from September 1986 writers began quoting Gardner as having said those are the only two plots. QI cautions that no record of Gardner actually saying it has been found — and that the Tolstoy credit, which first surfaces in 1999, is spurious.

Last verified 10 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“There are only two plots in all of literature: (1) A person goes on a journey, (2) A stranger comes to town” NOT Tolstoy. No source for it exists in his works, and Quote Investigator calls the Tolstoy link unsupported and apparently spurious. The trail runs through John Gardner's writing teaching: his posthumous handbook The Art of Fiction (Knopf, 1984) sets an exercise using "either a trip or the arrival of a stranger," and the earliest articulation of the two-plots claim that Quote Investigator located is David Long in Coda: Poets & Writers Newsletter, September 1986, crediting Gardner. The Tolstoy credit first appears in The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, in September 1999. Verified at Quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Leo Tolstoy. Use the credit shown above instead.

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We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

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In context

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Provenance

The closest thing to a source

Popularly credited to
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) — no source in any of his works
Catalysing text
The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
First published
1984, Alfred A. Knopf, New York — posthumous; John Gardner died in 1982
Earliest known articulation
David Long, Coda: Poets & Writers Newsletter, September 1986

As subject, use either a trip or the arrival of a stranger… A writing exercise, not an aphorism

This is the passage Quote Investigator identifies as the seed of the adage: an instruction to students in Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, telling them what to write an opening about. QI is careful to note that the exercise never asserts these two possibilities exhaust all plot choices — that leap was made by other people, later.

Borrowable book scan — 1985 Vintage Books edition
Read The Art of Fiction at the Internet Archive
Quote Investigator’s full chronology of the saying

How we verified this

  • 1984 — Gardner’s posthumous handbook The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers is published by Alfred A. Knopf (Open Library record ↗). One exercise tells students to write an opening using “either a trip or the arrival of a stranger” — without claiming those exhaust the possibilities (Quote Investigator ↗).
  • September 1986 — the earliest articulation of the two-plots claim that Quote Investigator located: the writer David Long, in Coda: Poets & Writers Newsletter, reports that Gardner “once observed that there are only two plots” (Quote Investigator ↗).
  • April 1987 — the novelist Mary Morris repeats it in a New York Times “Hers” column, still crediting Gardner, and the line starts to travel widely (American Dialect Society list ↗).
  • September 1999 — an article in The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin hands the saying to Leo Tolstoy. It is the earliest Tolstoy credit Quote Investigator located, arriving after more than a decade of the line circulating under Gardner’s name (Quote Investigator ↗).

No copyright status can honestly be asserted for the popular one-sentence wording: it has no traceable original text, and it varies from telling to telling — a trip or a journey, a man or a person, comes to town or rides into town. The nearest documented text, John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), remains in copyright to Gardner’s estate and its publisher, which is why only a short phrase from it is quoted here.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Four names, one adage, no source

This saying has been handed to a series of increasingly famous writers, and the record shows the handoffs happening in real time.

Leo Tolstoy Unsupported

The earliest Tolstoy attribution Quote Investigator found is a September 1999 article in The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin — more than a decade after the line was already in print under John Gardner’s name. No work of Tolstoy’s has ever been cited as containing it, and QI judges the link “currently unsupported.” (Quote Investigator ↗)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Unsupported

Tolstoy was not even the first Russian to be handed it. In a November 1996 interview in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the writer and musician Kinky Friedman credited Dostoyevsky with the two-story claim. Same absence of a source. (Quote Investigator ↗)

Ernest Hemingway — or Deepak Chopra Guesswork

By 2007 a Sydney Morning Herald writer was hedging across four names at once, naming Gardner, then wondering aloud whether it was Tolstoy, Hemingway or Deepak Chopra. A New York Times piece the same year simply said it had been attributed to everyone from Dostoyevsky to Gardner. (Quote Investigator ↗)

John Gardner Closest, still unproven

Gardner is where the trail actually leads, and every pre-1996 citation that names anyone at all names him — the one exception in QI’s chronology, an October 1991 Los Angeles Times instance, gives the saying with no attribution. But the exercise in his book only tells students to write an opening using a trip or the arrival of a stranger — it never claims those are the only two plots. QI suggests the adage may be an over-interpretation or misremembering of that exercise, or a remark he made in a classroom that was never recorded. (Quote Investigator ↗)

Quote Investigator ↗ concludes that Gardner’s words catalysed the adage but that it is not clear he ever made a matching statement — and that the linkage to Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and others is “currently unsupported and appears to be spurious.”

Context

Why this one spread

It is the perfect workshop line: short, absolute, and flattering to the person repeating it. Every story you can name seems to fit one of the two slots, and the ones that fit both feel like a discovery. That portability is exactly why it drifted — a line this quotable stops needing a source, and the name attached to it keeps getting upgraded.

The upgrade path is visible in the record. Through the late 1980s it is Gardner’s, because people had just read his craft books. By the mid-1990s it is Dostoyevsky’s. By 1999 it is Tolstoy’s. By 2007 a newspaper columnist was listing four possible authors and admitting he could not remember which. Nobody was lying; a good line simply gravitates toward the biggest name in the room.

The adage has a paper trail, and it starts in a 1986 writers’ newsletter — not in nineteenth-century Russia.

Two details that give the game away

The wording never settles. Across the citations Quote Investigator gathered, it is a trip or a journey; a man, a person or a friend; a stranger who comes to town or rides into town; two plots, two stories, two themes or two kinds of stories. Genuine textual quotations tend to stabilise around the words on the page. This one behaves like something remembered from a classroom rather than copied from a book.

Even the Gardner attribution got confused. The 2007 Sydney Morning Herald piece calls him “thriller writer John Gardner” — a label that fits not him but his British namesake, the novelist who wrote the continuation James Bond books. By that point the saying had detached from any particular person at all.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Creativity Simplicity Change

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: "There Are Only Two Plots"quoteinvestigator.com

The definitive chronology — every dated citation from Gardner’s 1984 exercise through the 1986 first articulation, the 1996 Dostoyevsky credit, the 1999 Tolstoy credit, and QI’s verdict that the Russian attributions are spurious.
American Dialect Society list: the working threadlistserv.linguistlist.org

Garson O’Toole’s May 2015 post to the ADS-L mailing list laying out the same research for other quotation scholars, including the 1987 Mary Morris column in the New York Times.
The Art of Fiction (borrowable scan)archive.org

A lending copy of Gardner’s craft handbook — the 1985 Vintage Books edition — so you can read the trip-or-stranger exercise in its actual context.
The Art of Fiction: catalog recordopenlibrary.org

Bibliographic confirmation that the first edition was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1984, two years after Gardner’s death.
Wikiquote: Leo Tolstoyen.wikiquote.org

Tolstoy’s sourced quotations, arranged work by work, plus a Disputed section. The two-plots saying appears nowhere on the page.
Wikipedia: John Gardner (American writer)en.wikipedia.org

Biography of the likeliest source — his dates, his novels, his teaching at Bread Loaf and Binghamton, and the 1982 motorcycle accident that made his craft books posthumous.

The likeliest source

The writing teacher behind the adage

John Gardner

1933–1982 · American novelist and creative-writing teacher

John Gardner was born on 21 July 1933 in Batavia, New York, and died on 14 September 1982 in a motorcycle accident in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania. He is best known for Grendel, which retells Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, and for October Light, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was a lifelong teacher of fiction writing: at Oberlin, at Chico State — where Raymond Carver was among his students — and at San Francisco State, Bennington, Binghamton and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His two craft books, On Becoming a Novelist and The Art of Fiction, appeared after his death and became fixtures of American writing classrooms, which is very likely how a line from his workshop hardened into an adage.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite this page

Earliest known articulation located by Quote Investigator: David Long, in “Coda: Poets & Writers Newsletter” (September 1986), crediting John Gardner. Catalysing text: John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). Chronology: Garson O’Toole, “Quote Origin: There Are Only Two Plots: (1) A Person Goes on a Journey (2) A Stranger Comes to Town,” Quote Investigator, 6 May 2015.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There are only two plots in all of literature: (1) A person goes on a journey, (2) A stranger comes to town’?” Last verified 10 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/there-are-only-two-plots-in-all-of-literature-1-a-person/

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