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I disagree, a story is like looking at a finished picture puzzle, the specifics are the pieces that make the puzzle, if you have two puzzles with different pieces but end up with the same picture it’s really irrelevant that the pieces were different.
But what you’re describing is that the whole picture is just the plot. That’s silly. The picture would be the story. The plot would just be what the shapes are that put the pieces together. But it’s a bad analogy.
Think of it more like a building. The plot is just the foundation. It’s what you build on top of that that really matters.
Um… a story is the overall chain of events. A lot of real stories can be boring. You could make a movie about someone’s day at work and if you pick a normal day the movie would be boring. Plot is the literary device that takes a story and elevates it to something special. The plot is the specific chain of events (sometimes a web of events if you have multiple characters) with one thing leading to another. Plot would be using flashbacks to take that otherwise boring seeming day and making it something unusual. For Star Wars, the crawl sets up the story and the plot. You can also think of story as timeline and plot as how the scene connect. Story tells you someone died, plot tells you how and gives you the emotional impact.
Nope.
Sorry, but the way I learned it is the story is the events, and plot is how you arrange them to tell them. For instance, in The Upside, we start with two guys in a car. That scene is toward the end of the story and after we jump back to the beginning of the story, we work our way forward until we get to the scene again and then move past it. That is the plot. We tell the story by rearranging the events to make them have more impact. The plot of the movie jumps from the later scene to the beginning and works back. Also, the book The Cloud Atlas is arranged as 6 stories, each broken in the middle. We start with one the move through them to the center one and then back off each one and finish the story. The movie version took that story and changed the plot by interconnecting the 6 stories into a different narrative. And by casting the same actors in roles in each of the settings, it wove the main idea of the plot into the fabric of the film in a different way. The two stories are identical, but they are plotted differently.
And to use the word in a related way, when you plot a course on a map, you are picking point A and B and deciding how to get from one to the other. Different people might take different routes and create different plots. Additionally, in the early days of CAD, drawings were made using actual pens. The device was called a plotter because it plotted the lines on the paper as the computer told it to. A plot is the line the connects the points. The same way you plot a course by sea or air, you plot a story’s course through the events. Plot comes from a French word for plan or project. You don’t provide a story summary when trying to sell your writing, you provide a plot summary. It is how you are going to tell your story, whatever story that may be.