plot

The tradition & historical record

The plot is the series of related events in a narrative. So, each event (except the final one) affects at least one other. Plot may be synonymous with storyline. Simple plots, such as in a traditional ballad, can be linearly sequenced, but plots can also exhibit complex interwoven structures, with each part sometimes referred to as a subplot. E. M. Forster described plot events as relating through the principle of cause-and-effect; the causal events of a plot can be thought of as a selective collection of events from a narrative, all linked by the connector "and so". According to American science fiction writer Ansen Dibell, the term plot highlights important points which have consequences within the story, in the narrative sense. The premise sets up the plot, the characters take part in events, while the setting is not only part of, but also influences, the final story. In common usage (e.g., a "film plot"), the word plot more often refers to a narrative summary, or story synopsis. The term plot originally served as a verb, as part of the craft of writing, referring to the writer devising and ordering story events. (A related meaning is the oldest: a character's planning of future actions in the story.) ¹

Early 20th-century English novelist E. M. Forster described plot as the cause-and-effect relationship between events in a story. According to Forster, "The king died, and then the queen died, is a story, while The king died, and then the queen died of grief, is a plot." Teri Shaffer Yamada, Ph.D., of CSULB, agrees that a plot does not include memorable scenes within a story that do not relate directly to other events but only "major events that move the action in a narrative." For example, in the 1997 film Titanic, when Rose climbs on the railing at the front of the ship and spreads her hands as if she's flying, this scene is memorable but does not directly influence other events, so it may not be considered as part of the plot. Another example of a memorable scene that is not part of the plot occurs in the 1980 film The Empire Strikes Back, when Han Solo is frozen in carbonite. ¹

The literary theory of Russian Formalism in the early 20th century divided a narrative into two elements: the fabula (фа́була) and the syuzhet (сюже́т). A fabula is the chronology of the fictional world, whereas a syuzhet is a perspective or plot thread of those events. Formalist followers eventually translated the fabula/syuzhet to the concept of story/plot. This definition is usually used in narratology, in parallel with Forster's definition. The fabula (story) is what happened in chronological order. In contrast, the syuzhet (plot) means a unique sequence of discourse that was sorted out by the (implied) author. That is, the syuzhet can consist of picking up the fabula events in non-chronological order; for example, fabula is ⟨a1, a2, a3, a4, a5, ..., an⟩, syuzhet is ⟨a5, a1, a3⟩. The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky viewed the syuzhet as the fabula defamiliarized. Defamiliarization or "making strange," a term Shklovsky coined and popularized, upends familiar ways of presenting a story, slows down the reader's perception, and makes the story appear unfamiliar. Shklovsky cites Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy as an example of a fabula that has been defamiliarized. Sterne uses temporal displacements, digressions, and causal disruptions (for example, placing the effects before their causes) to slow down the reader's ability to reassemble the (familiar) story. As a result, the syuzhet "makes strange" the fabula. ¹

According to hylistics, narrative material (German: Erzählstoff) is being used to tell stories across different media. In such a way, narrative material is not the story itself as it appears in a specific medium, but the underlying sequence of events across all versions. These sequences have to be reconstructed and arranged in logical and chronological order using minimal state- or action-bearing units called hylemes. Two categories of hylemes are distinguished: those describing states and those describing actions. Because hylemes are represented in a standardised, logically structured form (subject–predicate–object), narrative materials can be reconstructed independently of their medial manifestation, which enables structural comparisons across different media, such as texts, films, or images. ¹

A story (fabula) orders events from beginning to end in a time sequence. Consider the following events in the European folk tale "Cinderella": ¹

The prince searches for Cinderella with the glass shoe Cinderella's sisters try the shoe on themselves but it does not fit them The shoe fits Cinderella's foot so the prince finds her The first event is causally related to the third event, while the second event, though descriptive, does not directly impact the outcome. As a result, according to Ansen Dibell, the plot can be described as the first event "and so" the last event, while the story can be described by all three events in order. ¹

Fiction-writing coach Steve Alcorn says that plot elements for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz are easy to name, and he gives as examples: ¹

A tornado picks up a house in Kansas and drops it on a witch in a fantastical land. A girl and her dog meet three interesting traveling companions: a scarecrow, a tin woodsman, and a lion. A wizard sends them on a mission to get a broomstick. They melt another witch with a bucket of water, completing their mission. The story would contain other incidents, like when the protagonists fall asleep in a field of poppies, or how the dog causes problems with the neighbor. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Plot (narrative)”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

plot is concept in narratology: presentation of a sequence of events in a narrative work, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 18 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²