What is the Difference Between PLOT and STORY?
Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1701)
Story comes FIRST.
Plot comes SECOND. Although sometimes you have to plot something out first for the real STORY to reveal itself.
What’s the difference? What is STORY?
Lisa Cron says it’s “how what happens AFFECTS someone (the main character) with a deceptively difficult goal and how that person solves the problem, or how they are affected by attempting to solve it. (Deceptively difficult because it grows and multiplies).”
Story is about INTERNAL CHANGE in the protagonist.
All stories are emotion-based. If we’re not feeling, we’re not reading. (Also Lisa Cron)
Fine. Then what is PLOT?
Plot is how writers arrange and time events to show this change in the main character.
It’s one problem that grows and escalates through the story and how we orchestrate that.
The Queen died. Then the King died, is the old example of two events.
The Queen died, then the King died of a broken heart, they say, is the PLOT.
Really, it’s the story. One event caused the character to react as he did in the second event.
We would show this STORY (tragedy) with a PLOT possibly like this:
1. The queen dies.
2. The king listlessly attends the funeral and accepts condolences. He wants her alive again.
3. The king tries to make decision about the looming war but is indecisive (the queen always helped him.)
4. The king falls ill with a mysterious ailment and stops eating. The queen always tended him.
5. The court surgeon attempts to cure him but can’t find anything physically wrong. Uses leeches anyway.
6. The king’s advisors despair and try in vain to help the king get back to “normal.”
7. The kingdom is invaded and erupts into war. The king tries to rally. But…
8. The king, realizing that he will never again have his queen in this realm, and that material things like kingdoms and riches are meaningless without love, wastes away and dies as his kingdom falls into the hands of the Visigoths and Orcs.
The emotional story is why we read fiction. Make sure you’ve got that right, and that the PLOT proceeds in the best way to show these emotions and change. (As if that were so simple.) Then, voila! STORY.
Ann Jacobus teaches plotting and novel writing to writers of all ages. Her latest novel for young adults is THE COLDEST WINTER I EVER SPENT.
