The Difference Between Plot and Story
When looking at some sites about plot and story, I ran across this quote (or misquote?) a few times:
The king died and then the queen died.
The king died and then the queen died of grief.
The first sentence is a story, while the second is a plot. Apparently this example comes from E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. According to this review, the book is 175 pages of must-read material!
Anyway, I do like that example of his. I also like this explanation:
A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order.
A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance.
The way I think of it, a plain story is like history: boring. 
But a plot is someone’s telling of the story. It may be biased or inaccurate, but it’s more interesting! Many works of fiction are based on the same basic stories or actual events. Is there even such a thing as a truly original story? I doubt it.
I’m sure I’m not the only one that gets frustrated when trying to come up with an original story. Everything’s been done before! I need to constantly remind myself that the originality is all in the plot, the telling of the story.
August 15th, 2007
yeh i think the same
July 27th, 2008
I think this thing is just confusing I wish we didnt have to distinguish between the two the meanings overlap and its all the same to me. In theory it appears as though its easy to differentiate but when analysing a story to find the plot and story its virtually impossible to sift out the different things. Anyway thats wat I think
September 14th, 2008
wow tnx for the definitions. Easier to understand than my film textbook.
October 17th, 2008
To my own understanding, there is no diff btw a plot and a story. Both is a form of narrating an event bcos both have characters.
November 23rd, 2008
To Gladys:
No, you are quite wrong. The Story is events in chronological order, and a plot is events both diegetic and non, that are told in a certain form (or order) that is deliberately constructed to highlight certain meanings, motifs, symbols, and feelings. If you have ever seen a movie with a flashback, or even many flashbacks, say “Flags of our Fathers” then you will see that chronologically it is a few brief war scenes and the war bond campaign trail that followed, while its complicated flashback narrative tells us that the film is really about a question of heroism exploitation. How there is no intrinsically heroic action, and the creation of heroes and icons is a practice that strips the humanity and the consequence of human memory of meaning from those involved.
In short, your “own understanding” is just so uninformed and poorly stated that the film critic in me is crying inside.
November 27th, 2008
whalemenace did you take that straight from a textbook (I’m sure you know which one)? Anyway good example with a film like Flags of our fathers. citizen Kane is the definitive film with regards to analysing plot and story though.
November 30th, 2008
I did not take it directly from a textbook… but I did regurgitate it from film class, which is about the same thing. I had to write a paper on flags/letters and how their narrative structure changed the focus of the films despite centering around the same event. Contemplating that is actually what lead me to this page.
Also were you insinuating that you know the textbook? in our class we used “looking at movies”, but I never bought it.
December 1st, 2008
Wow, here I thought this little blurb I wrote would never see the light of day, but it turns out people are running across it somehow!
This is an interesting discussion, too. The dictionary definitions of plot and story don’t really indicate any significant differences between the two. And in everyday usage, plot and story are just synonyms.
So I wonder… did these two words have overlapping meanings first, and then they got picked up by the film and literature world? Or did they start with the more precise meanings, only to be mixed up by the general public?
December 2nd, 2008
Flags of our fathers was a good example, i wish id though of it, i was in a rush to do my coursework, and ended up using i robot as my example text…