Stories make use of recurring ideas called "tropes" which repeat across genres and through time. The community at TVTropes.org catalogues these tropes in an enormous wiki, collecting examples for every imaginable trope with light-hearted glee. I created the Periodic Table of Storytelling as an introduction to TVTropes; it's an infographic that organizes the basic building blocks of storytelling into a familiar format.
This was the project I used to teach myself jQuery. It's licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial, so feel free to fork it and make any changes you like. For commercial usage, email me and we'll work something out.