Plot versus story

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 132

In Technique in Fiction, Macauley and Lanning make what I think is a helpful distinction between story and plot. (Others have made this distinction too--I just thought I’d cite this book because it gives a pretty comprehensive overview on the subject.)

A story is a sequence of events prompted by the question, “And then what happened?” whereas a plot contains events causally linked to each other, prompting the question, “Why?”

Story, of course, is the primitive granddaddy of the two. The slice-of-life fiction I referred to last week would fall under the story category. Plot is an artifice and a much more recent invention. It’s a story structured into a basic pyramid shape, consisting of establishment of characters and situation, rising action, climax, and falling action (the names of these elements vary, but this is the simplest example). Real life doesn’t have a single plot in which events build upon each other neatly, causing other events, which bring about a dramatic moment of change or crisis, after which everyone dies or lives happily ever after, depending on whether the tale is a tragedy or comedy.

In real life, it is difficult if not impossible to establish causation. In fact, if you study logical fallacies, you know that one of the most common is post hoc, ergo propter hoc, or mistakenly assuming that one event caused another merely because it happened beforehand. Maybe that’s part of what makes fiction so satisfying: we can replay the chain of events and see exactly what caused everything to go to hell in a hand basket. Sure, we guess about the causes of the things that happen to us in our real lives, but when it comes down to it, it’s always just that: a guess.

As a writer, you may rail against the practice of following any plot model and think it’s formulaic, but I know when I think back over my favorite books, they all have some kind of discernible plot structure. Sometimes it’s better to use the tried and true guidelines of your predecessors than to try to completely reinvent the wheel.