Alexandre Dumas appears to have been a fundamentally commercial writer—highly skilled, energetic, and prolific—rather than an artist driven by deep internal compulsion. He recognised narrative potential in the world around him and transformed it rapidly into entertainment. By contrast, writers such as Goethe seem to have conjured stories from a different psychological impulse: not merely to entertain, but to articulate an inner landscape or truth, to express emotional or philosophical pressure revelations from personal experience.

A similar distinction can be observed in cinema. Quentin Tarantino resembles Dumas in his instinct for spectacle, genre, and energetic storytelling, while filmmakers such as David Lynch or Greta Gerwig seem closer to Goethe’s mode—producing work that originates in introspection, anxiety, and self-expression, rather than an external drive to captivate an audience at any cost.

The Goethe mode generally carries strong, often novel messages: modern parables that explore new moral, existential, or philosophical territory. The Dumas mode, on the other hand, tends to operate with conventional emotional material—love, betrayal, revenge, hope, forgiveness—yet delivers it with ingenuity, flair, and entertainment value. Both approaches are valuable. One might compare Goethe’s approach to revolutionary science, which produces paradigm shifts, while Dumas’s resembles “normal science”, refining and extending existing frameworks.

In that sense, we can identify landmark figures who introduced new philosophies, genres or themes, and whose innovations were later utilised, adapted, and remixed by subsequent writers. In the former category, one might include (broadly speaking): Jesus (whose parables articulated new ethical and spiritual ideas), Shakespeare (who transformed inherited narratives by foregrounding previously unexplored psychological and moral complexities), Goethe, Mary Shelley, Sartre, and Kafka. In the latter category we find the majority of writers, who contribute to literature not by inventing new modes of thought, but by enlivening existing ones.

Dumas was “Dumas” because of his extraordinary ability to keep audiences engaged, to create addictive narrative momentum, and to deploy familiar storytelling tools with stylish execution. He was not, however, a writer who invented new plot forms, new thematic paradigms, or new philosophical frameworks. He belongs more to the tradition of the storyteller and entertainer than to the tradition of the artist-as-philosopher.

The underlying motives of these two kinds of artists differ. For Dumas, the impulse is outward-facing: “I want to entertain people right now.” For Goethe, it is inward-facing: “I have something pressing within me that must be expressed.” Dumas writes to delight others; Goethe writes to reckon with himself.

Regardless of category, however, all writers appear to begin with a high-level conceptual seed that answers three fundamental questions: who is the story about? what is it about, or what is the central conflict? and how do things change? The last question usually implies at least a partial sense of the ending, even if the climax is not yet defined. In some cases this conceptual seed emerges quickly—after reading a historical anecdote over lunch, for example, and recognising its fictional potential. In other cases, it emerges only after months or years of emotional or existential struggle.