The Difference Between Story and Plot

A lot of people might know there is a difference between the two, but don’t actually know what that difference is. When entering University, we were taught about the differences of story and plot, and once knowing this, it’s quite easy to understand what these definitions are and how they intertwine with each other. 

Story: Is a sequence of events in your narrative; better known as a timeline.

Plot: It helps make the story come to life, it supports the story by linking the events together with a number of elements. 

A common example is:

Story: The King died and then the Queen died.

Plot: The King died and then the Queen died of grief. 

As you can see here the first one states what happens. Whereas the plot adds another layer of emotions, and helps the reader understand what kind of relationship the Queen and King had, and that was actually a loveable one. 

To go more in dept:

Story:

→ It can be seen everywhere, not only in books but in our lives and on the news. 

→ It is like a journey. It begins at one place, but finishes somewhere else. 

→ Imagine this sequence as start, middle, end. By the end something must have changed. Whatever this is, will help you plot your fiction. 

Plot:

→ It’s a literary device that enables writers to tell a story. Think about it as stepping stones to get from the start to the end, something new has to happen on each of these stepping stones. 

→ Adding what the genre is, who the characters are, etc… The plot will change if the genre is a historical fiction compared to crime, as it affects who the characters are and how they behave and therefore changes how one would tell the story.

→ It’s how you hold the readers’ interests. Think about what happens if… As well as thinking about when to reveal information to your readers.

The next step is knowing how to plot your story. Some people do go a lot deeper than other writers and that’s fine. I advise you to at least plot your main characters and know the start and end of your creative piece. Doing this should help you know roughly what could happen during the journey from A to B. 

Plotting a Story: 

1. The first step is kind of obvious, think of a story.
   E.g. The man caught the bus as usual and sat next to a person who changed their life. 

2. Now, it’s the plotting part. Depending on the length of your story will affect how complex your story is.
   → Think of what type of genre you want it to be. If it’s an adventure genre then this is roughly what could happen:
   The person he sat next to began sharing a legend about missing treasure. They go on this adventure and find the treasure. Of course you will have to plot more to figure out what will happen during their journey, and what type of relationship will they develop.
   → Knowing your genre you can next think about what type of characters you will have, what kind of role will they play in your novel, etc…
   → After this, you can plot the events that happen throughout your creative piece. Understand how they all link together; why each event is happening because of a previous event.

3. After all of this, you can write, and watch how your imagination comes to life. 

If you need help plotting, think about these five simple elements. They might seem familiar due to learning about them at school:

1. Introduction

2. Rising Action

3. The Climax

4. Falling Action

5. Conclusion

Knowing the differences between the two you can see how they are intertwined, you cannot write a novel if you do not plot what could happen during your writing, yet you cannot plot without knowing the story you want to tell. 

Enjoy writing.