My understanding of what plot is — in a movie, a novel, a story of any kind — has changed a lot over the years. I had one definition of it, then another, now another. One thing I am sure of is that not everyone agrees what that word, plot, exactly describes. Another thing I am sure of: Many people compliment a movie’s plot when they mean to compliment the story. (“It had a good plot” is one of the lamest motes of a review an audience member can offer, in my opinion; it’s tantamount to saying “Events sure did take place over time.”)
And so, I give you the next GPW question:
What the hell is a plot?
I’ll start easy and old-school —
The plot is the sequence of events in a narrative.
— c.
How does that compare to what the story is?
The plot is the sequence in which scenes are presented, is that right? Not the sequence in which they occur?
Consider, for example, flashbacks. I think of them as scenes that occupy a different place in the plot than they do in the narrative. What about you?
Plot, as Aristotle tells us, is the arrangement of incidents in drama. Which is to say that flashbacks are in a different place in the plot than they are in the story.
A “good plot” is one, pace Aristotle, that is self-contained (no deus ex machinae, scenes following cause and effect), complex (reversal of intention, sudden recognition, and reversal of fortune), and serious (i.e., not written by the Iowa School of Fiction).
Is plot the spine and story the creature?
I think plot is a combination of the “story” and elements of pacing. Plot has some intangibles involving the revelation and use of information.
Hmm. Others have said something similar, but I’ll say it again. Not to seem redundant, but I’d say whereas story is what happens, plot is how it happens: the journey, rather than a simple summary of origin and destination.
To phrase it differently, the story is the summary. The plot is where the fun is.
Oh man, Seth, do I disagree. Plot can be fun, but a story is not a summary. Good yarns are not great plots with maybe a story involved. When somebody says, “Tell me the story,” they want to hear more than, “I started out in Tulsa and, in the end, I made it to Paris.” The intervening journey is important, and it doesn’t belong to any one plot, which implies the story/journey is distinct from plot.
The same journey can have two different plots (see, for example, The Two Towers book versus the film), and remain identifiably the same story, no? A plot on its own is a series of index cards, and nobody publishes those.
Adam, I agree that plot involves the timing and method in which events are revealed, and certainly pacing grows from it in part. Flashbacks, for example, often reveal information (sometimes at the peril of pacing) separate from what is being revealed during the course of the narrative. See, for example, LOST, for flashbacks given to the audience but not to the characters — they belong to the plot and thus the story, but are not present in narrative order.
Am I wrong?
I think trying to figure out what a word “really” means is futile; trying different definitions and seeing which ones are useful or illuminating is actually worth the time it takes.
In context or roleplaying discussions, plot often means the course of events the railroad will take players through. Sometimes it means the history behind the railroad, or in good cases history behind something that is not a railroad.
Is plot the spine and story the creature?
I like this image. Now it has me trying to figure where other elements of story would fit in that analogy.
Ah, an example! Here’s a quote from today’s review of Ghostbusters: The Video Game at CHUD.com:
“There’s a story about a cult and an evil ghost trying to bring together dimensions but it’s all lackluster, and the majority of the story seem to be in place to give you more enemies to fight, rather than service the plot.”
First, without having played the game, I might argue that a game has to be more concerned with providing things to do than providing stories (see Tetris).
More to the point, this statement suggests that the purpose of a story is to service the plot. Or that it is crazy to have a story that doesn’t exist to prop up a plot. That is 100% completely backwards, to me. Am I wrong?
Tommi, thanks for bringing up RPGs specifically. In RPGs, it seems to me like plot is as likely to mean the definition that’s synonymous with “scheme.” As in, the plot is the GM’s plot to get the characters from Encounter A to Encounter B.
I would argue (and have) that plot exists in free-form games, too. It is merely created on the fly, as an actual chain of cause-and-effect, during play. The play generates the plot — the sequence of events — that may or may not be a part of a story worth retelling, but that was probably worth playing.
The statement “plot exists in free-form games, too” is one of the rallying cries of the so-called “old skool” movement, the idea that RPGs don’t need a story OR a plot as part of game design or gameplay, because the “story” is what is left when the game is over and you recount your deeds. I tend to think that they are missing the point — although their gameplay style is a perfectly valid and fun one — but that’s a different topic.
If we accept that “plot” includes elements of pacing and information-revelation, then it seems to me that in a videogame story does serve plot. The play experience in a videogame relies much more heavily on good pacing than it does on good storytelling, at least that’s my take. That’s why JRPGs don’t do it for me: I find the “plots” to be tedious, repetitive, and uninspired, even when the stories are good, when unshackled from the game’s pacing.
I think the “scene progression” diagrams in SAS products (I’m thinking specifically of the Geist quickstart I picked up today) are a good summary of plot, if you look at them and think “I should spend roughly the same amount of time/prep resources/emotional investment on each of these”. The story is all the details, and what you learn, and the actual events of the game.
That said, is it possible that games like Dirty Secrets are mechanically structured in such a way as to provide a compelling plot, regardless of what the story ends up being?
(I’m skipping the notion of which other groups happen to sound like me, because that is a whole other issue.)
I think the SAS structure is a good summary of pre-written plot accommodating a degree of player choice, but the SAS model is one of my designs, so I’m biased.
An important point of the SAS design is to reduce freedom down to meaningful choices about the plot, so that plot can serve the story and an SAS story can still be about something specific beyond its setup, without utterly revoking player freedom. That is, by my metrics, the plot serves the story — it exists to make it easy for the Storyteller and players to tell a tale. The tale is not just an excuse to march through the plot.
That those priorities are so easily flopped around without a major difference in functionality is both a strength of the mechanism and perhaps a weakness of my thinking.
That’s a great point, Adam, about plot and pacing in video games. I may be wrong there. But, while plot can concern elements of pacing, in a video game architecture (via level design) and enemy strength or ingenuity affect pacing, too. Are they part of plot?
Pacing is a part of plot but it’s put there through storytelling — you can credit the spices or you can credit the cook. Part of my argument against praising plot is that plot is just a component of storytelling — eating a delicious meal and then telling the cook only, “I liked the cardamom,” is a little insulting.
Remember, I necessarily like plot as I love to tell stories. My issue is with the misuse of the term and how it got that way.
So maybe a better question would’ve been: “When you praise a movie’s plot, what the hell are you trying to praise?”
Well, I think it’s probably fair to say that people mean “story” when they say “that movie had a great plot”, because if they are praising the storytelling, then they are praising the narrative voice, the story itself, the character development, the ideas that are dealt with. Like with a lot of words, people are choosing a “more technical” term to describe something because it makes them sound smarter, and given enough time, that can dilute the original meaning of the word.
That said, you might praise the “plot” of a movie or book without praising anything else if you felt like you were really moved by the action, your emotions were manipulated in all the right ways, but something about the setting or characters or narrative devices left you unfulfilled.
Without a specific example to discuss, I find myself thinking that editing, acting, writing, and cinematography are likely to have as much (or more?) influence on the impact of action and the manipulation of emotion than plot, but in the abstract the whole discussion is probably ridiculous.
Hm. Acting and writing, definitely. But I suppose that’s another way to approach the question: of the people who make a film, who is (primarily) responsible for the creation of plot?
The screenwriter, obviously has a hand in it, but the director’s influence can’t be denied. The film and script editors, obviously. The actors, in a way, since they deliver the lines, although they are “slaved” the the impact of the writer and director.
The difficulty for me in this discussion is that the word “story” basically has two parallel meanings in my brain, one of which is a 1:1 synonym with “plot” and the other of which is the “sum-of-its-parts” definition that includes the other vagaries of storytelling, in addition to that. But that’s my malfunction.
Adam, I think it’s dodgy at best to imagine that anyone other than the screenwriter is primarily responsible for the creation of plot in a film, unless you’re talking about an adapted work. Others can have major impact, but if you take out the various contributors one at a time and see what’s left of the movie in each case, when the screenwriter disappears, none of the rest of the “creators” even know which city they’re supposed to go stand in, or what clothes they’re supposed to put on. But of course I’d defend screenwriters.
In raw terms of responsibility for the creation of plot—the events that transpire in order within the story—I’d say that the editor stands next in line, and the director’s third, and then mostly because he gives the editor his marching orders.
To me, Plot is where the rubber meets the road, the basic thread of events that holds everything else together. Everything you hang off of that thread, or that you use the thread to support, (characters, theme, authorial viewpoint, possibly even world-building) combines with the plot to make the Story.
In my mind, elements of construction (that is to say, use of flashbacks or other non-linear devices, 3-act structure, act-outs if you’re talking television) contribute to forming the plot and certainly can affect story, but aren’t intrinsically part of either one per se.
This is an imperfect comparison, but I’d say it’s like how the shape of the glass can show off the best qualities of a wine, but doesn’t actually change the chemical make-up of the liquid.